Intimations: Six Essays

by Zadie Smith

‘The war has been won by the efforts of all our people, who, with very few exceptions, put the nation first and their private and sectional interests a long way second …. Why should we suppose that we can attain our aims in peace – food, clothing, homes, education, leisure, social security and full employment for all – by putting private interests first?’

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.

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

Amen to that!

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.

In England, we were offered an infuriating but comparatively comic rendering of this virus, in the form of the Prime Minister’s ‘ideas man’, Dominic, whose most fundamental idea is that the categorical imperative doesn’t exist. 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. Technocratic contempt. Philosopher King contempt. When you catch the British strain you believe the people are there to be ruled. They are to be handled, played, withstood, tolerated – up to a point – ridiculed (behind closed doors), sentimentalized, bowdlerized, nudged, kept under surveillance, directed, used, and closely listened to, but only for the purposes of data collection, through which means you harvest the raw material required to manipulate them further. At the press conference, you could see Dominic was riddled with the virus – had been for months. Only his mouth went through the motions. His mouth said that he had driven thirty miles from Durham to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight. The rest of his face was overwhelmed with the usual symptoms, visible to all. Boredom, annoyance, impatience, incredulity. His eyes, refreshed by the driving test, spoke volumes: Why are you bothering me with this nonsense? Contempt. Back in February, ‘herd immunity’ had been a new concept for the people – or that broad cross section of the people who are neither epidemiologists nor regular readers of ...

Brilliant!

The officer had a sadistic version of the same face. Why are you bothering me with this bullshit? The bullshit in this case being a man explaining he couldn’t breathe under the pressure of the officer’s knee on his neck. A man called George. He was alerting the officer to the fact that he was about to die. You’d have to hate a man a lot to kneel on his neck till he dies in plain view of a crowd and a camera, knowing the consequences this would likely have upon your own life. (Or you’d have to be pretty certain of immunity from the herd – not an unsafe bet for a white police officer, historically, in America.) But this was something darker – deadlier. It was the virus, in its most lethal manifestation.

This whole section and the essay text before and after is worth a re-read.