Intimations

by Zadie Smith

But I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

I was a woman, but not that kind of woman. “Internalized misogyny,” I suppose they’d call all of the above now. I have no better term. But at the hot core of it there was an obsession with control, common among my people (writers).

Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance.

Death absolute is the truth of our existence as a whole, of course, but America has rarely been philosophically inclined to consider existence as a whole, preferring instead to attack death as a series of discrete problems.

Maybe this is why plagues—being considered insufficiently hierarchical in nature, too inattentive to income disparity—were long ago relegated to history in the American imagination, or to other continents.

Untimely death has rarely been random in these United States. It has usually had a precise physiognomy, location and bottom line. For millions of Americans, it’s always been a war.

War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence.

Death comes to all—but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.

“The war has been won by the efforts of all our people, who, with very few exceptions, put the nation first and their private and sectional interests a long way second. . . . Why should we suppose that we can attain our aims in peace—food, clothing, homes, education, leisure, social security and full employment for all—by putting private interests first?”

As Americans never tire of arguing, there may be many areas of our lives in which private interest plays the central role. But, as postwar Europe, exhausted by absolute death, collectively decided, health care shouldn’t be one of them.

Now there are essential workers—who do not need to seek out something to do; whose task is vital and unrelenting—and there are the rest of us, all with a certain amount of time on our hands.

Those of us from puritan cultures feel “work must be done,” and so we make the cake, or start the gardening project, or begin negotiation with the other writer in the house for those kid-free hours each day in which to work on “something.”

It seems it would follow that writers—so familiar with empty time and with being alone—should manage this situation better than most. Instead, in the first week I found out how much of my old life was about hiding from life.

Confronted with the problem of life served neat, without distraction or adornment or superstructure, I had almost no idea of what to do with it.

I’d make up hard things to do, or things to abstain from. Artificial limits and so on. Running is what I know. Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the way I do time. The way I’ve done it all my life.

At the end of April, in a powerful essay by another writer, Ottessa Moshfegh, I read this line about love: “Without it, life is just ‘doing time.’”

Busyness will not disguise its lack. Even if you’re working from home every moment God gives—even if you don’t have a minute to spare—still all of that time, without love, will feel empty and endless.

There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love.

Love is not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through—that must be why it frightens so many of us and why we so often approach it indirectly.

Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do “something,” that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

As a rule of social etiquette, when confronted with a pixelated screen of a dozen people, all of them inquiring, somewhat half-heartedly, as to “how you are,” it is appropriate to make the expected, decent and accurate claim that you are fine and privileged, lucky compared to so many others, inconvenienced, yes, melancholy often, but not suffering.

Ever since I was a child my only thought or insight into apocalypse, disaster or war has been that I myself have no “survival instinct,” nor any strong desire to survive, especially if what lies on the other side of survival is just me.

I always tell my students: “A style is a means of insisting on something.” A line of Sontag’s.

When we look at familiar things, at familiar people, style recedes, or becomes totally invisible. (Sontag makes the same point about “realism.”)

The enviable style of the young is little protection against catastrophe.

I have to remind myself to remember this: their style is all they have. They are insisting on their existence in a vacuum.

What modest dreamers we have become.

Has America metabolized contempt? Has it lived with the virus so long that it no longer fears it? Is there a strong enough desire for a different America within America?