Intimations Read online

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  Copyright © 2020 by Zadie Smith

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  “The American Exception” was first published in The New Yorker, April 10, 2020

  ISBN 9780593297612 (paperback)

  ISBN 9780593297629 (ebook)

  The author will donate her royalties from the sale of Intimations to charity.

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  For Jackie and Jay

  It stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.

  MARCUS AURELIUS

  My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

  GRACE PALEY

  Contents

  Foreword

  Peonies

  The American Exception

  Something to Do

  Suffering Like Mel Gibson

  Screengrabs • (After Berger, before the virus)

  A MAN WITH STRONG HANDS

  A CHARACTER IN A WHEELCHAIR IN THE VESTIBULE

  A WOMAN WITH A LITTLE DOG

  A HOVERING YOUNG MAN

  AN ELDER AT THE 98 BUS STOP

  A PROVOCATION IN THE PARK

  POSTSCRIPT: CONTEMPT AS A VIRUS

  Intimations

  Foreword

  THERE WILL BE many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytical, political, as well as comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those—the year isn’t halfway done. What I’ve tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity.

  Early on in the crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius and for the first time in my life read his Meditations not as an academic exercise, nor in pursuit of pleasure, but with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table—I was in need of practical assistance. (That the assistance Aurelius offers is for the spirit makes it no less practical in my view.) Since that moment, one form of crisis has collided with another, and I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book. But I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

  MAY 31, 2020

  LONDON

  Peonies

  JUST BEFORE I left New York, I found myself in an unexpected position: clinging to the bars of the Jefferson Market Garden, looking in. A moment before, I’d been on the run as usual, intending to exploit two minutes of time I’d carved out of the forty-five-minute increments into which, back then, I divided my days. Each block of time packed tight and leveled off precisely, like a child prepping a sandcastle. Two “free” minutes meant a macchiato. (In an ideal, cashless world, if nobody spoke to me.) In those days, the sharp end of my spade was primed against chatty baristas, overly friendly mothers, needy students, curious readers—anyone I considered a threat to the program. Oh, I was very well defended. But this was a sneak attack . . . by horticulture. Tulips. Springing up in a little city garden, from a triangle of soil where three roads met. Not a very sophisticated flower—a child could draw it—and these were garish: pink with orange highlights. Even as I was peering in at them I wished they were peonies.

  City born, city bred, I wasn’t aware of having an especially keen interest in flowers—at least no interest strong enough to forgo coffee. But my fingers were curled around those iron bars. I wasn’t letting go. Nor was I alone. Either side of Jefferson stood two other women, both around my age, staring through the bars. The day was cold, bright, blue. Not a cloud between the World Trade and the old seven-digit painted phone number for Bigelow’s. We all had somewhere to be. But some powerful instinct had drawn us here, and the predatory way we were ogling those tulips put me in mind of Nabokov, describing the supposed genesis of Lolita: “As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” I’ve always been interested in that quote—without believing a word of it. (Something inspired Lolita. I’m certain no primates were involved.) The scientist offers the piece of charcoal expecting or hoping for a transcendent revelation about this ape, but the revelation turns out to be one of contingency, of a certain set of circumstances—of things as they happen to be. The ape is caged in by its nature, by its instincts, and by its circumstance. (Which of these takes the primary role is for zoologists to debate.) So it goes. I didn’t need a Freudian to tell me that three middle-aged women, teetering at the brink of peri-menopause, had been drawn to a gaudy symbol of fertility and renewal in the middle of a barren concrete metropolis . . . and, indeed, when we three spotted each other there were shamefaced smiles all round. But in my case the shame was not what it would have once been, back in the day—back when I first read Lolita, as a young woman. 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. I had “cycles.” They did not. I was to pay attention to “clocks.” They needn’t. There were special words for me, lurking on the horizon, prepackaged to mark the possible future stages of my existence. I might become a spinster. I might become a crone. I might be a babe or a MILF or “childless.” My brothers, no matter what else might befall them, would remain men. And in the end of it all, if I was lucky, I would become that most piteous of things, an old lady, whom I already understood was a figure everybody felt free to patronize, even children.

  “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”—I used to listen to that song and try to imagine its counterpart. 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, and so I would refuse to keep any track whatsoever of my menstrual cycle, preferring to cry on Monday and find out the (supposed) reason for my tears on Tuesday. Yes, much better this than to properly prepare for a blue Monday or believe it in any way inevitable. My moods were my own. They had no reflection in nature. I refused to countenance the idea that anything about me might have a cyclic, monthly motion. And if I had children one day, I would have them “on my own timeline,” irrespective of how the bells were tolling on all those dreaded clocks in the women’s magazines. Of “broodiness” I would hear nothing: I was not a hen. And if, when I was in my twenties, any bold Freudian had dared to suggest that my apartment—filled as it was with furry cushions and furry rugs and furry bolsters, furry throws and furry footstools—in any sense implied a sublimated desire for animal company, or that I was subconsciously feathering my nest in expectation of new life, well, I would have shown that impertinent Freudian the door. I was a woman, but not that kind of woman. “Internalized misogyny,” I suppose they’d call all of the above now. I
have no better term. But at the hot core of it there was an obsession with control, common among my people (writers).

  Writing is routinely described as “creative”—this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I’ve never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance. Which can be a handsome, and sometimes even a useful, activity—on the page. But, in my experience, turns out to be a pretty hopeless practice for real life. In real life, submission and resistance have no predetermined shape. Even more befuddling, to a writer like me, is that the values normally associated with those words on a page—submission, negative; resistance, positive—cannot be relied upon out in the field. Sometimes it is right to submit to love, and wrong to resist affection. Sometimes it is wrong to resist disease and right to submit to the inevitable. And vice versa. 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. But out in the field, experience has no chapter headings or paragraph breaks or ellipses in which to catch your breath . . . it just keeps coming at you.

  Now, more than ever—to use a popular narrative mold—I know that. It happens that the day I was drawn to those tulips was a few days before the global humbling began—one that arrived equally for men and women both—but in my own shallow puddle of experience it’s these dumb tulips that served as a tiny, early preview of what I now feel every moment of every day, that is, the complex and ambivalent nature of “submission.” If only it were possible to simply state these feelings without insisting on them, without making an argument or a dogma out of them! This type of woman and that type of woman—just so many life rings thrown to a drowning Heraclitus. Each one a different form of fiction. Is it possible to be as flexible on the page—as shamelessly self-forgiving and ever changing—as we are in life? We can’t seem to find the way. Instead, to write is to swim in an ocean of hypocrisies, moment by moment. We know we are deluded, but the strange thing is that this delusion is necessary, if only temporarily, to create the mold in the first place, the one into which you pour everything you can’t give shape to in life. This is all better said by Kierkegaard, in a parable:

  “THE DOG KENNEL BY THE PALACE”

  To what shall we compare the relation between the thinker’s system and his actual existence?

  A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and world-history etc.—and if we contemplate his personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in this immense high-vaulted palace, but in a barn alongside of it, or in a dog kennel, or at the most in the porter’s lodge. If one were to take the liberty of calling his attention to this by a single word, he would be offended. For he has no fear of being under a delusion, if only he can get the system completed . . . by means of the delusion.

  They were tulips. I wanted them to be peonies. In my story, they are, they will be, they were and will forever be peonies—for, when I am writing, space and time itself bend to my will! Through the medium of tenses! In real life, the dog kennel is where I make my home. When I was a kid, I thought I’d rather be a brain in a jar than a “natural woman.” I have turned out to be some odd combination of both, from moment to moment, and with no control over when and where or why those moments occur. Whether the “natural” part of my womanhood is an essential biological fact or an expression (as de Beauvoir argued) of an acculturation so deep it looks very much like roots growing out of the bulb, at this point in my life I confess I don’t know and I don’t care. I am not a scientist or a sociologist. I’m a novelist. Who can admit, late in the day, during this strange and overwhelming season of death that collides, outside my window, with the emergence of dandelions, that spring sometimes rises in me, too, and the moon may occasionally tug at my moods, and if I hear a strange baby cry some part of me still leaps to attention—to submission. And once in a while a vulgar strain of spring flower will circumvent a long-trained and self-consciously strict downtown aesthetic. Just before an unprecedented April arrives and makes a nonsense of every line.

  The American Exception

  HE SPEAKS TRUTH so rarely that when you hear it from his own mouth—March 29, 2020—it has the force of revelation: “I wish we could have our old life back. We had the greatest economy that we’ve ever had, and we didn’t have death.”

  Well, maybe not the whole, unvarnished truth. The first clause was neither true nor false: it described only a desire. A desire which, when I heard it—and found its bleating echo in myself—I’ll admit I weighed in my hand, for a moment, like a shiny apple. It sounded like a decent “wartime” wish, war being the analogy he’s chosen to use. But no one in 1945 wished to return to the “old life,” to return to 1939—except to resurrect the dead. Disaster demanded a new dawn. Only new thinking can lead to a new dawn. We know that. Yet as he said it—“I wish we could have our old life back”—he caught his audience in a moment of weakness: in their dressing gowns, weeping, or on a work call, or with a baby on their hip and a work call, or putting on a homemade hazmat suit to brave the subway, on the way to work that cannot be done at home, while millions of bored children climbed the walls from coast to coast. And, yes, in that brittle context, “the old life” had a comforting sound, if only rhetorically, like “once upon a time” or “but I LOVE him!” The second clause brought me back to my senses. Snake oil, snake oil, snake oil. The devil is consistent, if nothing else. I dropped that apple, and, lo, it was putrid and full of worms.

  Then he spoke the truth: we didn’t have death.

  We had dead people. We had casualties and we had victims. We had more or less innocent bystanders. We had body counts and sometimes even photos in the newspapers of body bags, though many felt it was wrong to show them. We had “unequal health outcomes.” But, in America, all of these involved some culpability on the part of the dead. Wrong place, wrong time. Wrong skin color. Wrong side of the tracks. Wrong Zip Code, wrong beliefs, wrong city. Wrong position of hands when asked to exit the vehicle. Wrong health insurance—or none. Wrong attitude to the police officer. 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.

  Maybe this is why plagues—being considered insufficiently hierarchical in nature, too inattentive to income disparity—were long ago relegated to history in the American imagination, or to other continents. In fact, as he made clear early on in his presidency, entire “shithole” countries were to be considered culpable for their own high death rates—they were by definition in the wrong place (over there) at the wrong time (an earlier stage of development). Such places were plagued in the permanent sense, by not having the foresight to be America. Even global mass extinction—in the form of environmental col
lapse—was not going to reach America, or would reach it only ultimately, at the very last minute. Relatively secure, in its high-walled haven, America would feast on whatever was left of its resources, still great by comparison with the suffering out there, beyond its borders.

  But now, as he so rightly points out, we are great with death—we are mighty with it. There is a fear, when all of this is said and done, that America will lead the world in it. And yet, perversely, the supposed democratic nature of plague—the way in which it can strike all registered voters equally—turns out to be somewhat overstated. A plague it is, but American hierarchies, hundreds of years in the making, are not so easily overturned. Amid the great swath of indiscriminate death, some old American distinctions persist. Black and Latino people are now dying at twice the rate of white and Asian people. More poor people are dying than rich. More in urban centers than in the country. The virus map of the New York boroughs turns redder along precisely the same lines as it would if the relative shade of crimson counted not infection and death but income brackets and middle-school ratings. Untimely death has rarely been random in these United States. It has usually had a precise physiognomy, location and bottom line. For millions of Americans, it’s always been a war.

  Now, apparently for the first time, he sees it. And, in a hurry for glory, he calls himself a wartime president. Let him take that title, as the British prime minister, across the ocean, likewise attempts to place himself in the Churchillian role. Churchill (who actually fulfilled his wartime role) learned the hard way that even when the people follow you into war, and even when they agree you’ve had a “good” war, this does not necessarily mean they want to return to the “old life,” or be led by you into the new one. 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.