Intimations

by Zadie Smith

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.

Sometimes it is right to submit to love, and wrong to resist affection.

Each novel you read (never mind the novels you write) will give you some theory of which attitude is best to strike at which moment, and—if you experience enough of them—will provide you, at the very least, with a wide repertoire of possible attitudes. But out in the field, experience has no chapter headings or paragraph breaks or ellipses in which to catch your breath . . . it just keeps coming at you.

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.

Black and Latino people are now dying at twice the rate of white and Asian people. More poor people are dying than rich. More in urban centers than in the country. The virus map of the New York boroughs turns redder along precisely the same lines as it would if the relative shade of crimson counted not infection and death but income brackets and middle-school ratings.

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. Strange inversions proliferate. People find themselves applauding a national health service that their own government criminally underfunded and neglected these past ten years. People thank God for “essential” workers they once considered lowly, who not so long ago they despised for wanting fifteen bucks an hour.

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

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.’” I don’t think she intended by this only romantic love, or parental love, or familial love or really any kind of love in particular. At least, I read it in the Platonic sense:

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.

old habits die hard. I can’t rid myself of the need to do “something,” to make “something,” to feel that this new expanse of time hasn’t been “wasted.”

Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating your conception of reality.

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.

“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.”

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

The enviable style of the young is little protection against catastrophe. And the infinite promise of American youth—a promise elaborately articulated by movies and advertisements and university prospectuses—has been an empty lie for so long that I notice my students joking about it with a black humor more appropriate to old men, to the veterans of wars.

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

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.

the truth is that not enough carriers of this virus have ever been willing to risk the potential loss of any aspect of their social capital to find out what kind of America might lie on the other side of segregation. They are very happy to “blackout” their social media for a day, to read all-black books, and “educate” themselves about black issues—as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their actual schools.

To forgive anyone who has wounded you, no matter how badly, especially if there is any sign whatsoever that a person has, in wounding you, also wounded themselves.

But it is the task in front of you. Delight in it. The more absurd and tiny it is, the more care and dedication it deserves. Large, sensible projects require far less belief. People who dedicate themselves to unimportant things will sometimes be blind to the formal borders that are placed around the important world.

But the magic to be found in the black box will never be forgotten by any who entered it.

To have one layer of skin less than the others, and therefore to feel it all: the good and the bad, the beautiful and the abject. Not only to make art but in some sense to live 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.

To be never finished thinking, because everything is as infinite as God. To know there is a metaphysics of everything.

When in the presence of a child, get on the floor. Or else bend down until your own and the child’s eyes meet.

Knowing all your neighbors’ names is an art.