On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

– and it’s very cool to be able to pray without someone in your family coming into the room and (a) passing wind (b) shouting (c) analysing the ‘phoney metaphysics’ of prayer (d) singing loudly (e) laughing. So that’s Carlene Kipps. Tell Mom that she bakes. Just tell her that and then walk away chuckling . . .

This interested Howard, for a moment: the idea that he could no longer gauge the luxuries of his own life.

When it comes to weather, New Englanders are delusional.

He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.

There was a New Yorker cartoon on the fridge that Kiki now wished she had taken down. An upscale couple in the back of a limo. Woman saying: Of course they’re clever. They have to be clever. They haven’t got any money.

On Beauty No, we could not itemize the list of sins they can’t forgive us. The beautiful don’t lack the wound. It is always beginning to snow. Of sins they can’t forgive us speech is beautifully useless. It is always beginning to snow. The beautiful know this. Speech is beautifully useless. They are the damned. The beautiful know this. They stand around unnatural as statuary. They are the damned and so their sadness is perfect, delicate as an egg placed in your palm. Hard, it is decorated with their face and so their sadness is perfect. The beautiful don’t lack the wound. Hard, it is decorated with their face. No, we could not itemize the list. Cape Cod, May 1974

‘Art is the Western myth,’ announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row, ‘with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.’

honey, any woman who counts on her face is a fool.

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

They ended only with your apology or with Zora’s delivery of something a little poisonous, wrapped up in pretty paper.

Half-lived life. The unexamined life is not worth living. That had been Howard’s callow teenage dictum. Nobody tells you, at seventeen, that examining it will be half the trouble.

What a demoralizing philosophy! What message do we give to our children when we tell them that they are not fit for the same meritocracy as their white counterparts?’

‘Kiki, if there’s one thing I understand about you liberals, it’s how much you like to be told a fairytale. You complain about creation myths – but you have a dozen of your own. Liberals never believe that conservatives are motivated by moral convictions as profoundly held as those you liberals profess yourselves to hold. You choose to believe that conservatives are motivated by a deep self-hatred, by some form of . . . psychological flaw. But, my dear, that’s the most comforting fairytale of them all!’