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,” to my animal body—to the whole simian realm of instinct—and far more elementally so than, say, my brothers.

You could make someone feel like a “real” man—no doubt its own kind of cage—but never a natural one. A man was a man was a man. He bent nature to his will. He did not submit to it, except in death. Submission to nature was to be my realm, but I wanted no part of that,

In real life, submission and resistance have no predetermined shape.

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.

What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence.

Do we know how to stop?

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?

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.

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.

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.

Do you feel ever more distant from the world? Or has the world, in its new extremity, finally come to you?

Real change would involve a broad recognition that the fatalist, essentialist race discourse we often employ as a superficial cure for the symptoms of this virus manages, in practice, to smoothly obscure the fact that the DNA of this virus is economic at base. Therefore, it is most effectively attacked when many different members of the plague class—that is, all economically exploited people, whatever their race—act in solidarity with each other. It would involve the (painful) recognition that this virus infects not only individuals but entire power structures, as any black citizen who has been pinned to the ground by a black police officer can attest. If our elected representatives have contempt for us, if the forces of so-called law and order likewise hold us in contempt, it’s because they think we have no recourse, and no power, except for the one force they have long assumed too splintered, too divided and too forgotten to be of any use: the power of the people. The time has long past when only one community’s work would be required to cure what ails us.

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.

People who dedicate themselves to unimportant things will sometimes be blind to the formal borders that are placed around the important world.