Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive.

She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something.

all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself.

My earliest sense of her was of a woman plotting an escape,

People are not poor because they’ve made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they’re poor.

What if we didn’t plonk our children in front of the telly each day, to watch the cartoons and the soap operas? What if we gave them, instead, a lump of clay, and poured water over it, and showed them how to spin it round until a shape formed between their hands? What kind of a society would that be?

But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain.

I didn’t understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom.

I wondered if it were possible for me, too, to become a person who revealed themselves later in life,

my rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done.

But isn’t there also a deep expectation of sameness between parent and child? I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my

the way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality,

This life is nothing compared to eternity—this life you are in is only the half-second before midnight. I am not living for this half-second but for what comes after.’

The boys I’d known had had no passions, not really, they couldn’t afford them: it was the act of not caring that was important to them. They were in a lifelong contest with each other—and with the world—exactly to demonstrate who cared less,

A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.”

“Sometimes I wonder if people don’t want freedom as much as they want meaning,” he said, speaking slowly.

“Mum, you just said it yourself: you can’t save everybody.” She nodded several times and brought a napkin to her damp cheeks. “That’s true,” she said. “Very true. But at the same time, can’t you always do more?”

“Do you think she’s happy?” He smiled as if I had been caught out somehow. “Ah, yes—for Americans this is always the most important question!”

to generate meaning out of the broken shards of this and that,

It’s a question of what love gives you the right to do.

devoting all time and energy to somebody else’s existence, to somebody else’s desires and needs and requirements. It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you.

Time was on my side, as much as it is on anyone’s. Everything that afternoon felt wide open to me, a kind of shock, I didn’t know what was happening in the next few days or even the next few hours—a new feeling.