Intimations

by Zadie Smith

Barbara lives alone, she’s coming up on seventy, surely, and she smokes the way I used to: with great relish and evident satisfaction. Perhaps because of all the cigarettes, she is slender and often seems somewhat frail. In the past ten years her tall, elegant body has become a little more hunched over and sometimes she uses a walker, but not always.

She has a tendency to list rightwards these days, like a willow, and her bone-straight hair, that swishes like a young woman’s—and somehow always makes me think of Barbara as an ex-dancer—likewise now lists and seems permanently swept over one shoulder.

She has a broad New York accent the precise borough and decade of which I can’t identify, except to tell you few people in Manhattan seem to have this accent anymore.

There is an ideal, rent-controlled city dweller who appears to experience no self-pity, who knows exactly how long to talk to someone in the street, who creates community without overly sentimentalizing the concept—or ever saying aloud the word “community”—and who always picks up after their dog, even if it’s physically painful to do so. Whose daily breakfast is a cigarette and a croissant from the French place on the corner,

and I could see Barbara was preparing to bark one of her ambivalent declamations at me, about the weather or a piece of prose, or some new outrage committed by the leader of a country which, in Barbara’s mind, only theoretically includes her own city. Already missing New York, I was keen to hear it. Instead she sucked hard on her cigarette and said, in a voice far quieter than I’d ever heard her use: “Thing is, we’re a community, and we got each other’s back. You’ll be there for me, and I’ll be there for you, and we’ll all be there for each other, the whole building. Nothing to be afraid of—we’ll get through this, all of us, together.”

with his inimitable energy, slightly exophthalmic, puggish eyes, and irregularly coiled, unpredictable Afro, so like my own.

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

those kids of my generation who took apart Atari joysticks to see how they worked, who remember no greater joy in a cinema than the moment Marty McFly rode a pink flying skateboard over a municipal pond, and yes, structurally, the style of Cy was probably not a million miles distant from Carlton doing that dumb dance from The Fresh Prince. . .

an energy that, as it turns out, is already in existence—in this case, the style of Cy that I’m trying to get across to you. I can see that it is a style that connects him with many other souls who are in possession of similar styles (and this family resemblance is hopefully what allows you to bring Cy to mind as I describe him) but still—in the form I experienced it that day in the park—Cy’s particular form of insistence was unique.

The whole back line of her body spoke of power and youth, although, by the local coordinates she was giving me—whose cousin knew which sibling’s girlfriend at what time—I understood she must be an elder,

I got ready to receive whatever was coming. It was a bounty:

a symbol of a certain uncontained and uncontainable fecundity, a natural abundance, which I suppose I sheepishly connect in my mind with Jamaica, with its residents, its diaspora, bougainvillea, hills, gullies, music, stories. A typical second-generation question to ask yourself: how did all that prior abundance fit into this new habitat?

—and anyway, your brother knew her, she was in his year, and her boyfriend killed her last night, in her flat in Stonebridge, poor, poor thing—what? No, no, no, this girl was YOUNG—she was in Luke’s year, you’re not listening to me, you never listen properly. Anyway, this lockdown is driving people crazy, maybe, I don’t know. . . . It’s just so sad. And then he set the flat on fire and it’s been burning all night.

The statement, The police are investigating this as a hate crime always prompts in me the query: when it comes to murder, what other kind of crime is there? I realize that’s banal but I can’t help it. I think what I resent is not the recognition of a murderer’s motivation—which should never be obscured—but an elevation of importance in what strikes me as the wrong direction. To think of a hate crime as the most uniquely heinous of crimes seems to lend it, in my mind, an undeserved aura of power. I’d rather something else.

He believes he did not walk into the church and murder a circle of innocent people, like a murderer, no, he went in there to express his “ideology” through the medium of violence, to commit his “act,” girded by what he flatters himself is a comprehensive philosophy. Why do we take him at his word?

No, the killer took a base urge—hate—and robed it in clichés. The police are investigating a hate robed in clichés, projected outwards. Admittedly, it’s a mouthful.

You’d have to hate a man a lot to kneel on his neck till he dies in plain view of a crowd and a camera, knowing the consequences this would likely have upon your own life. (Or you’d have to be pretty certain of immunity from the herd—not an unsafe bet for a white police officer, historically, in America.) But this was something darker—deadlier. It was the virus, in its most lethal manifestation.

My Mother Energy, vitality, charisma. The source: an undimmed childishness. Which I share.

Yes, we sang it well; the song was beautiful. We owed it to the song.

12. Lorraine Hansberry “When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right.” Therefore: compassion.

The value of being that person who remembers the childhoods of others better than they themselves recall them, and takes it upon themselves to preserve said childhoods for safekeeping. Sending an old friend’s childhood back to them at the very moment they are most in need of it.

To make use of your missing layer at all times in all things. To read every line of a book with the same sense of involvement and culpability as if you had written it yourself. And, conversely, to write your own sentences as if you had no more ownership over the lines than a stranger. To be never finished thinking, because everything is as infinite as God. To know there is a metaphysics of everything.

24. Dave As improbable as it often seems, it is possible to act. To lead. To use your imagination to build practical structures that will in some form improve the lives of the people who enter them.

The truth is that some people have a gift for action. In some people this gift is outsized, disproportionate, extraordinary to witness.

Making small talk is an art, and never to be despised just because you yourself dread making it.

Knowing all your neighbors’ names is an art.

But above all these: playing. The tales of adult women who still know how to play with children—these should be honored. Collected in a history book, like Vasari’s Lives of the...

That I was an oldest child, with all the shameful obliviousness that implies.