Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

who had no patience for sentimental readings of history—and cringed. We left the dogs

was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case. I thought you needed to think like that to achieve anything in this

world. Yes, I thought that was a very elegant attitude. And I became fixated, too,

What could she know about the waves of time that simply come at a person, one after the other? What could she know about life as the temporary, always partial, survival of that process?

I wondered how these people were able to tell, so precisely, the moment that they began to feel like a person.