The Fraud

by Zadie Smith

It was as if even the little misunderstandings were placed in their path deliberately, to better illustrate the workings of grace.

But it is the perverse business of mirrors never to inform women of their beauty in the present moment, preferring instead to operate on a system of cruel delay.

Then there were these moments of grace when she startled herself with the idea that if anybody truly understood what is signified by the word ‘person’, they would consider twelve lifetimes too brief a spell in which to love a single soul.

We mistake each other. Our whole social arrangement a series of mistakes and compromises. Shorthand for a mystery too large to be seen. If they knew what I knew they would feel as I do! Yet even once one had glimpsed behind the veil which separates people, as she had – how hard it proves to keep the lives of others in mind! Everything conspires against it. Life itself.