Intimations

by Zadie Smith

Early on in the crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius and for the first time in my life read his Meditations not as an academic exercise, nor in pursuit of pleasure, but with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table—I was in need of practical assistance. (That the assistance Aurelius offers is for the spirit makes it no less practical in my view.) Since that moment, one form of crisis has collided with another, and I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book. But I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

A moment before, I’d been on the run as usual, intending to exploit two minutes of time I’d carved out of the forty-five-minute increments into which, back then, I divided my days. Each block of time packed tight and leveled off precisely, like a child prepping a sandcastle. Two “free” minutes meant a macchiato. (In an ideal, cashless world, if nobody spoke to me.) In those days, the sharp end of my spade was primed against chatty baristas, overly friendly mothers, needy students, curious readers—anyone I considered a threat to the program. Oh, I was very well defended. But this was a sneak attack . . . by horticulture. Tulips.

The day was cold, bright, blue. Not a cloud between the World Trade and the old seven-digit painted phone number for Bigelow’s.

Weird timing after just finishing The Only Plane in the Sky

“As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” I’ve always been interested in that quote—without believing a word of it. (Something inspired Lolita. I’m certain no primates were involved.)

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,” to my animal body—to the whole simian realm of instinct—and far more elementally so than, say, my brothers. I had “cycles.” They did not. I was to pay attention to “clocks.” They needn’t. 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.

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. 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.

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.

They were tulips. I wanted them to be peonies. In my story, they are, they will be, they were and will forever be peonies—for, when I am writing, space and time itself bend to my will! Through the medium of tenses! In real life, the dog kennel is where I make my home.

I am not a scientist or a sociologist. 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.

sounded like a decent “wartime” wish, war being the analogy he’s chosen to use. But no one in 1945 wished to return to the “old life,” to return to 1939—except to resurrect the dead. Disaster demanded a new dawn. Only new thinking can lead to a new dawn. We know that.

And yet, perversely, the supposed democratic nature of plague—the way in which it can strike all registered voters equally—turns out to be somewhat overstated. A plague it is, but American hierarchies, hundreds of years in the making, are not so easily overturned.

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.

Now I am gratified to find this most honest of phrases in everybody’s mouths all of a sudden, and in answer to almost every question. Why did you bake that banana bread? It was something to do. Why did you make a fort in your living room? Well, it’s something to do. Why dress the dog as a cat? It’s something to do, isn’t it? Fills the time.

Out of an expanse of time, you carve a little area—that nobody asked you to carve—and you do “something.”

But even if you believe in the potential political efficacy of art—as I do—few artists would dare count on its timeliness. It’s a delusional painter who finishes a canvas at two o’clock and expects radical societal transformation by four. Even when artists write manifestos, they are (hopefully) aware that their exigent tone is, finally, borrowed, only echoing and mimicking the urgency of the guerrilla’s demands, or the activist’s protests, rather than truly enacting it.

What strikes me at once is how conflicted we feel about this new liberty and/or captivity. On the one hand, like pugs who have been lifted out of a body of water, our little limbs keep pumping on, as they did when we were hurrying off to our workplaces. Do we know how to stop? 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.” We make banana bread, we sew dresses, we go for a run, we complete all the levels of Minecraft, we do something, then photograph that something, and not infrequently put it online. Reactions are mixed, even in our own hearts. 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.

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.

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.’” 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: Love with a capital L, an ideal form and essential part of the universe—like “Beauty” or the color red—from which all particular examples on earth take their nature.

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. Here is this novel, made with love. Here is this banana bread, made with love.

And yet, in my case, I can’t let it go: 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.” Still, it’s nice to have company. 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.

THE MISERY IS very precisely designed, and different for each person, and if you didn’t know better you’d say the gods of comedy and tragedy had a hand in it. The single human, in the city apartment, thinks, I have never known such loneliness. The married human, in the country place with partner and children, dreams of isolation within isolation. All the artists with children—who treasured isolation as the most precious thing they owned—find out what it is to live without privacy and without time. The writer learns how not to write. The actor not to act. The painter how never to see her studio and so on. The artists without children are delighted by all the free time, for a time, until time itself begins to take on an accusatory look, a judgmental cast, because the fact is it is hard to fill all this time sufficiently, given the sufferings of others. And besides, now there is no clocking off ever, and no drowning of artistic anxiety in a party or conversation or frantic exercise. Married men are confronted with the infinite reality of their wives, who cannot now be exchanged, even mentally, for a strange girl walking down the street. Her face, her face, her face. Your face, your face, your face. The only relief is two faces facing forwards, towards the screen. New lovers for the first time wonder about love. Is love enough? Perhaps a dog should be added to this endless pas de deux? Or some other living creature? Young people hunger for the touch of strangers—of anyone. Clu...

This is an immense passage to highlight but boy did she hit the nail on the head.

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.

Early on in the crisis, I read a news story concerning a young woman of only seventeen, who had killed herself three weeks into lockdown, because she “couldn’t go out and see her friends.” She was not a nurse, with inadequate PPE and a long commute, arriving at a ward of terrified people, bracing herself for a long day of death. But her suffering, like all suffering, was an absolute in her own mind, and applied itself to her body and mind as if uniquely shaped for her, and she could not overcome it and so she died.

AROUND THE same time that I read that news story, I was sent a meme that made me laugh out loud: a photograph of Mel Gibson, in a director’s chair, calmly talking to Jesus Christ himself. Jesus (also in a director’s chair) was patiently listening while soaked from head to toe in blood and wearing his crown of thorns.* The caption read: “Explaining to my friends with kids under six what it’s been like isolating alone.”

I don't think I ever saw this but it's pretty funny.