Intimations

by Zadie Smith

But at the hot core of it there was an obsession with control, common among my people (writers).

Writing is routinely described as “creative”—this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I’ve never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control.

Instead, to write is to swim in an ocean of hypocrisies, moment by moment.

We know we are deluded, but the strange thing is that this delusion is necessary, if only temporarily, to create the mold in the first place, the one into which you pour

everything you can’t give shape...

To what shall we compare the relation between the thinker’s system and his actual existence?

I’m a novelist. Who can admit, late in the day, during this strange and overwhelming season of death that collides, outside my window, with the emergence of dandelions, that spring sometimes rises in me, too, and the moon may occasionally tug at my moods, and if I hear a strange baby cry some part of me still leaps to attention—to submission. And once in a while a vulgar strain of spring flower will circumvent a long-trained and self-consciously strict downtown aesthetic. Just before an unprecedented April arrives and makes a nonsense of every line.

Disaster demanded a new dawn.

We had dead people. We had casualties and we had victims. We had more or less innocent bystanders. We had body counts and sometimes even photos in the newspapers of body bags, though many felt it was wrong to show them. We had “unequal health outcomes.” But, in America, all of these involved some culpability on the part of the dead. Wrong place, wrong time. Wrong skin color. Wrong side of the tracks. Wrong Zip Code, wrong beliefs, wrong city. Wrong position of hands when asked to exit the vehicle. Wrong health insurance—or none. Wrong attitude to the police officer. What we were completely missing, however, was the concept of death itself, death absolute.

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.

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.

peacetime words spoken by Clement Attlee, his opposite number in the House of Commons, the leader of the Labour Party, who beat Churchill in a postwar landslide: “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?”

none of them (including my own) see fit to mention the surest motivation I know, the one I feel deepest within myself, and which, when all is said, done, stripped away—as it is at the moment—seems to be at the truth of the matter for a lot of people, to wit: it’s something to do.

The something that artists have always done is more usually cordoned off from the rest of society, and by mutual agreement this space is considered a sort of charming but basically useless playpen, in which adults get to behave like children—making up stories and drawing pictures and so on—though at least they provide some form of pleasure to serious people, doing actual jobs.

exigent

As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity—and to time itself. It is something to do, yes, but when it is done, and whether it is done at all, is generally considered a question for artists alone. An attempt to connect the artist’s labor with the work of truly laboring people is frequently made but always strikes me as tenuous, with the fundamental dividing line being this question of the clock. Labor is work done by the clock (and paid by it, too). Art takes time and divides it up as art sees fit. It is something to do.

The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do in it.

But isn’t it the case that everybody finds their capabilities returning to them, even if it’s only the capacity to mourn what we have lost?

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. Back in the playpen, I carved out meaning by creating artificial deprivations within time, the kind usually provided for people by the real limitations of their real jobs. Things like “a firm place to be at nine a.m. every morning” or a “boss who tells you what to do.” In the absence of these fixed elements, 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.

I read this line about love: “Without it, life is just ‘doing time.’”

Love is not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through—that

If it weren’t for this habit of indirection, of course, there would be no culture in this world, and very little meaningful pleasure for any of us. Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, is an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself,

As clarifying as this conversation often was, it strikes me that it cannot now be applied, without modification, to the category of suffering. The temptation to overlay the first discourse upon the second is strong: privilege and suffering have a lot in common. They both manifest as bubbles, containing a person and distorting their vision. But it is possible to penetrate the bubble of privilege and even pop it—whereas the suffering bubble is impermeable. Language, logic, argument, rationale and relative perspective itself are no match for it. Suffering applies itself directly to its subject and will not be shamed out of itself or eradicated by righteous argument, no matter how objectively correct that argument may be.

Suffering is not relative; it is absolute. Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual—it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like “privilege.”

But when the bad day in your week finally arrives—and it comes to all—by which I mean, that particular moment when your sufferings, as puny as they may be in the wider scheme of things, direct themselves absolutely and only to you, as if precisely designed to destroy you and only you, at that point it might be worth allowing yourself the admission of the reality of suffering, if not for yourself, exactly, then in preparation for that next painful bout of videoconferencing, so that you don’t roll your eyes or laugh or puke while listening to what some other person seems to think is pain.

“A style is a means of insisting on something.” A line of Sontag’s.

But in fact everything has a style—and the same amount of it, even if we value or interpret each iteration differently.

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

But the young man in his twenties is still in peak dreaming season: a thrilling time, an insecure time, even at the best of times. It should be a season full of possibility. Economic, romantic, technological, political, existential possibility. Yes, among all the various relativities to be considered, age is one that can’t be parsed. The style of Cy—the style of all young people—now radically interrupted.

Instead of the complex judgment such a decision requires, I was left with the useless thoughts of a novelist: what is it like to have a mind-on-fire at such a moment? Do you feel ever more distant from the world? Or has the world, in its new extremity, finally come to you?

When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal.

(To fear the contagion of poverty is reasonable. To keep voting for policies that ensure the permanent existence of an underclass is what is meant by “structural racism.”)

But the questions 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? Real change would involve a broad recognition that the fatalist, essentialist race discourse we often employ as a superficial cure for the symptoms of this virus manages, in practice, to smoothly obscure the fact that the DNA of this virus is economic at base. Therefore, it is most effectively attacked when many different members of the plague class—that is, all economically exploited people, whatever their race—act in solidarity with each other. It would involve the (painful) recognition that this virus infects not only individuals but entire power structures, as any black citizen who has been pinned to the ground by a black police officer can attest.

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. Paranoia about action—and the motivations for action—is the sickly indulgence of intellectuals and philosophers. The truth is that some people have a gift for action. In some people this gift is outsized, disproportionate, extraordinary to witness.

Mothering is an art. Housekeeping is an art. Gardening is an art. Baking is an art. Those of us who have no natural gifts in these areas—or perhaps no interest—too easily dismiss them. 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. Sending cards at holidays, to everybody you know—this, too, is an art. But above all these: playing.