Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

by Zadie Smith

The story of Janie’s progress through three marriages confronts the reader with the significant idea that the choice one makes between partners, between one man and another (or one woman and another) stretches beyond romance. It is, in the end, the choice between values, possibilities, futures, hopes, arguments (shared concepts that fit the world as you experience it), languages (shared words that fit the world as you believe it to be) and lives.

Zora Neale Hurston – capable of expressing human vulnerability as well as its strength, lyrical without sentiment, romantic and yet rigorous and one of the few truly eloquent writers of sex – is as exceptional among black women writers as Tolstoy is among white male writers.

Krishna gives Arjina: ‘But thou hast only the right to work; but none to the fruit thereof; let not then the fruit of thy action be thy motive; nor yet be thou enamoured in inaction.’

He quotes approvingly this discussion, from The Magic Flute, between Jesus and Buddha: ‘Lord Buddha, was your gospel true?’ ‘True and False.’ ‘What was true in it?’ ‘Selflessness and Love.’ ‘What false?’ ‘Flight from Life.’

You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless.

In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law.

À propros: having had it suggested to him by a young friend that Picasso was ‘a willful distortionist’ who painted ‘rose-coloured women with gigantic feet’, Kafka replied: I do not think so… He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes ‘fast’, like a watch – sometimes.

If a right to a secret is not maintained then we are in a totalitarian space.

No one can hope to be president of the United States without professing a committed and straightforward belief in two things: the existence of God and the principle of American exceptionalism.

Halifax proudly called himself a trimmer, assuming it, Macaulay explains, as a title of honour, and vindicat[ing], with great vivacity, the dignity of the appellation. Everything good, he said, trims between extremes. The temperate zone trims between the climate in which men are roasted and the climate in which they are frozen. The English Church trims between the Anabaptist madness and the Papist lethargy. The English constitution trims between the Turkish despotism and Polish anarchy. Virtue is nothing but a just temper between propensities any one of which, if indulged to excess, becomes vice.

Italian Women is a subject to stretch from morning coffee to midday ravioli. ‘The land that feminism forgot!’ And on cue it all rolls out like an index: the degrading sexualization of, the nightly televisual humiliation of, Berlusconi’s condescending opinion of, perilous abortion rights of, low wages of, minimal parliamentary presence of, invisibility within the church of, et cetera.

Hollywood is vulgar. Every Englishman knows that. He knows it as he knows there is no comedy in Germany, as he knows that the Italians ‘get it right’, if ‘it’ includes food, marriage, weather and landscape but excludes governance, work, driving and God.

Family represents the reality of which Christmas is the dream. It is, of course, Family (messy, complex, miserable, happy, so many gradations of those last two words) that is the real gift, beneath the wrapping. Family is the daily miracle, and Christmas is the enforcement of ideals that, in truth, do not matter. It would be tempting therefore to say, ‘Well, then ditch Christmas!’ the same way people say ‘Ditch God’ or ‘Ditch marriage’, but people find it hard to do these things because they feel that there is more than a ghost in these machines; there is an animating spirit.

In the age of mechanical reproduction, prophesied Walter Benjamin, a painting such as the Mona Lisa will lose its aura: the more cheap postcards we make of her, the more she will disappear. But he was wrong – it turned out the erotic logic of capital worked the other way around. Her authentic aura increased.