Intimations

by Zadie Smith

(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.

And in the end of it all, if I was lucky, I would become that most piteous of things, an old lady, whom I already understood was a figure everybody felt free to patronize, even children.

Submission to nature was to be my realm, but I wanted no part of that, and so 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. Yes, much better this than to properly prepare for a blue Monday or believe it in any way inevitable.

“Internalized misogyny,” I suppose they’d call all of the above now. I have no better term. But at the hot core of it there was an obsession with control, common among my people (writers).

Oh shit

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.

For he has no fear of being under a delusion, if only he can get the system completed . . . by means of the delusion.

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!

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.

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.

Not that there is anything ridiculous about trying to lengthen the distance between the dates on our birth certificates and the ones on our tombstones: ethical life depends on the meaningfulness of that effort.

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s a delusional painter who finishes a canvas at two o’clock and expects radical societal transformation by four.

lol

The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. 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.

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. But the crisis has taken this familiar division between the time of art and the time of work and transformed it.

One of the radical political possibilities of our new, revelatory expanse of “free” time—as many have noted—is that it might create a collective demand to reassess and reconfigure, as a society, how we protect the rights of those whose work exists only in the present moment, without security or protection against unknown futures, the most obvious unknown future being “sick leave.”) The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do in 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. 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? We had delegated so much.

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.’” 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. 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.

Even if you’re working from home every moment God gives—even if you don’t have a minute to spare—still all of that time, without love, will feel empty and endless.

There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love.

maybe not their creation, but i think when they're brought into the world they become fundamentally relational and THEN are about '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. 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.

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.

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.

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

Suffering is not relative; it is absolute.

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.

As if me not writing for a day matters economically, personally, existentially, practically or in any way whatsoever.

or some new outrage committed by the leader of a country which, in Barbara’s mind, only theoretically includes her own city.

I always tell my students: “A style is a means of insisting on something.” A line of Sontag’s. Every semester I repeat it, and every year the meaning of this sentence extends and deepens in my mind, blooming and multiplying like a virus, until it covers not just literary aesthetics and the films of Leni Riefenstahl but bedrooms, gardens, makeup, spectacles, camera angles, dances, gaits, gestures, sexual positions, haircuts, iPhone covers, bathroom taps, fonts, drink orders, dogs and people, and so much more—but people above all.

Just as, when I first saw La Pedrera, in Barcelona, it struck me more as a belief system than a building, my ignorance of Gaudí being almost total. When we look at familiar things, at familiar people, style recedes, or becomes totally invisible. (Sontag makes the same point about “realism.”) But in fact everything has a style—and the same amount of it, even if we value or interpret each iteration differently.

The best we could hope for was that the university might act as a superstructure, like a Gaudí building, accommodating and supporting our curious shapes and styles, and that this institutional cover would fool people into thinking we were something like utilities—and therefore something worth retaining—rather than peculiar manifestations of the spirit, seemingly put on earth to connect one thing to another, and to make said connections smooth, visible and/or usable for others. . . .

She has lived long enough to see the social protections of her youth, which had not seemed to her dreams, but rather mundane realities—universal health care, free university education, decent public housing*—all now recast as revolutionary concepts, and thought of, in America (consistently by the right but not infrequently by the left) as badges of radical leftism. What modest dreamers we have become.

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.

The strange storytelling of videoconferencing began between my mother and me, where two or three storylines run concurrently—you catch up on the latest every few days—while you simultaneously stare at your own face, a surreal new advance in human conversation that leads to the self-conscious adaptation of one’s own emotional responses in direct response to how you feel they look aesthetically.

But instead I see a category called “the imposition of toxic narrative over phenomena”—the thickness and complexity of which can vary while the fundamental character of the crime remains the same.

I have similar questions about murder as “hate crime” and murder as murder. I find it hard to distinguish between forms of hate that have the same consequence. The hatred of women versus the hatred of this particular woman. 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.

The hatred of a group qua group is, after all, the most debased and irrational of hatreds, the weakest, the most banal. It shouldn’t radiate a special aura, lifting it into a separate epistemological category. For this is exactly what the killer believes. 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.

The profound misapprehension of reality is what, more or less, constitutes the mental state we used to call “madness,” and when the world itself turns unrecognizable, appears to go “mad,” I find myself wondering what the effect is on those who never in the first place experienced a smooth relation between the phenomena of the world and their own minds.

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?

And likewise with contempt: 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.

And having thus placed them in a category similar to the one in which we place animals, he experienced the same fear and contempt we have for animals. Animals being both subject to man and a threat to him simultaneously.