Intimations

by Zadie Smith

At that time, the cage of my circumstance, in my mind, was my gender. Not its actuality—I liked my body well enough. What I didn’t like was what I thought it signified: that I was tied to my “nature,”

There were special words for me, lurking on the horizon, prepackaged to mark the possible future stages of my existence. I might become a spinster. I might become a crone. I might be a babe or a MILF or “childless.” My brothers, no matter what else might befall them, would remain men.

I would refuse to keep any track whatsoever of my menstrual cycle, preferring to cry on Monday and find out the (supposed) reason for my tears on Tuesday.

inevitable. My moods were my own. They had no reflection in nature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Out of an expanse of time, you carve a little area—that nobody asked you to carve—and you do “something.” But perhaps the difference between the kind of something that I’m used to, and this new culture of doing something, is the moral anxiety that surrounds it.

Even as we do something, we simultaneously accuse ourselves: you use this extremity as only another occasion for self-improvement, another pointless act of self-realization.

Without this element present, in some form, somewhere in our lives, there really is only time, and there will always be too much of it. Busyness will not disguise its lack.

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.

Everyone has an anecdote about privilege they like to tell, a moment when they realized they, or somebody else, were seeing through a veil of assumption and/or relative ignorance.

“Nine hundred dollars!” cried the brown lady, with real disgust. “Imagine giving something worth nine hundred dollars to a baby.” “These people got rent money to burn,” confirmed the first lady, and together they laughed ruefully at the profligate fools of 8th Street.

Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating your conception of reality. But it can at least be brought to mind; acknowledged, comprehended, even atoned for through transformative action.

By comparing your relative privilege with that of others you may be able to modify both your world and the worlds outside of your world—if the will is there to do it.

Suffering is not relative; it is absolute. Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual—it cannot be easily media...

Responsible, rather, for the fifteen white-trousered livelihoods behind him—and God knows how many more. There he stood, scanning for customers, hoping for walk-ins—or wondering where I was, maybe.

I know he is fond of conspiracy theories, which I have never considered anything less than an entirely rational mode of processing contemporary American 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.

I don’t often look at the signs in the park anymore, they are too familiar to bother with, like the rats swarming out of the trash cans the minute the sun goes down. But I have to admit this guy had my attention. He was Asian, his sign was giant, and his message read: I AM A SELF-HATING ASIAN. LET’S TALK!

I find it hard to distinguish between forms of hate that have the same consequence.

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?

believing. As I understand it, it is usually considered a form of mental illness to hate oneself disproportionately, but unlike other forms of mental illness—I believe the devil speaks to me, I believe the government is controlled by aliens—we believe the man who tells us he hates himself. Whatever else he is doing, he is telling an awful kind of truth.

in the eyes of contempt, you don’t even truly rise to the level of a hated object—that would involve a full recognition of your existence.

Instead there is one rule for men like him, men with ideas, and another for the “people.” This is an especially British strain of the virus. Class contempt.

America would no longer be that thrilling place of unbelievable oppositions and spectacular violence that makes more equitable countries appear so tame and uneventful in comparison.

I used to think that there would one day be a vaccine: that if enough black people named the virus, explained it, demonstrated how it operates, videoed its effects, protested it peacefully, revealed how widespread it really is, how the symptoms arise, how so many Americans keep giving it to each other, irresponsibly and shamefully, generation after generation, causing intolerable and unending damage both to individual bodies and to the body politic—I thought if that knowledge became as widespread as could possibly be managed or imagined that we might finally reach some kind of herd immunity. I don’t think that anymore.

That prejudice is most dangerous not when it resides in individual hearts and minds but when it is preserved in systems.