Intimations

by Zadie Smith

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.

What we were completely missing, however, was the concept of death itself, death absolute. The kind of death that comes to us all, irrespective of position. 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. Wars on drugs, cancer, poverty, and so on. 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. But perhaps nowhere in the world has this effort—and its relative success—been linked so emphatically to money as it is in America.

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: 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. Busyness will not disguise its lack.

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.

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.

And it’s a naïve American who at this point thinks that integration—if it were ever to actually occur—would not create some initial losses on either side. A long-preserved privilege dies hard. A long-preserved isolation—even if it has been forced—is painful to emerge from. But I am talking in hypotheticals: 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.

An understated and often misunderstood aspect of privilege--white people aren't willing to lose it.