On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.

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

‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

‘It is easy to mistake a woman for a philosophy

If she was going to leave him, she should have done so in the winter. But she had stayed and now summer was here. The only account she could give of this decision was that she was not quite done loving him, which was the same as saying she was not yet done with Love – Love itself being coeval with knowing Howard. What was one night in Michigan set against Love!

Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn’t, she did what girls generally do when they don’t feel the part: she dressed it instead.

‘bohemian intellectual; fearless; graceful; brave and bold’.

‘The future’s another country, man,’ said Carl mournfully, and then the punchline seemed to come to him; his face surrendered to a smile. ‘And I still ain’t got a passport.’

‘Hardly – I didn’t say a word, practically.’ ‘Yeah, but you listen well. That’s the same thing.’

Nosce te ipsium,

Jack was now faced with a task he dreaded: saying something after reading a poem. Saying something to the poet.

Howard asked his students to imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion.

‘I don’t ask myself what did I live for,’ said Carlene strongly. ‘That is a man’s question. I ask whom did I live for.’

I see very clearly recently that in fact I didn’t live for an idea or even for God – I lived because I loved this person. I am very selfish, really. I lived for love. I never really interested myself in the world – my family, yes, but not the world. I can’t make a case for my life, but it is true.’

I said to him: my dear, life must come first over the Book. Otherwise, what is the Book for?

In fact, when she was not in company it didn’t seem to her that she had a face at all

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

Claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of ‘fittingness’: that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it – no matter how small or insignificant both might be – are matched exactly, are fitting. This, Claire argued, is when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful.

But it was the kind of marriage you couldn’t get a handle on. 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.

At that time her beauty was awesome, almost unspeakable, but more than this she radiated an essential female nature Claire had already imagined in her poetry – natural, honest, powerful, unmediated, full of something like genuine desire. A goddess of the everyday.

Womanish, as they said back then, not feminine.

It was not possible to make the last leap – to consider what it was Kiki now thought of Claire. To do that was to become subhuman before yourself, the person cast out beyond pity, a Caliban. Nobody can cast themselves out.

Not for the first time when talking to Howard’s daughter Claire felt estranged from her own being, as if she were indeed just another of the six billion extras playing in that fabulous stage show, the worldwide hit called Zora’s Life.

He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.

But then Katie began to notice all the exterior, human information, not explicitly in the frame but implied by what we see there.

these are the marks ofliving.

’Cos she wants to finish it or you do?’ he said finally. ‘Because she wants to,’ confirmed Howard, and found that he was comforted by the simplicity of his father’s questions. ‘And . . . because I can’t find enough reasons to stop her wanting to.’

Your class is all about never ever saying I like the tomato. That’s why so few people take it – I mean, no offence, it’s a compliment. They can’t handle the rigour of never saying I like the tomato. Because that’s the worst thing you could ever do in your class, right? Because the tomato’s not there to be liked.