Intimations
2020 has been a year unlike any other. It has challenged us, isolated us, terrorized us, and brought us together to face our shared fragility as mortal beings and as members of generationally-steeped racist cultures. Many of us have found ourselves contemplating many things—both deep and mundane—as we sit with the hard questions of what we do to fill our days now that days stretch out before us. Isolated from our friends and family members, forcing our children to live childhoods of social distance, even though that seems at wild odds with the very definition of childhood itself, this has been a year of extremes and paradoxes. Zadie Smith’s Intimations (2020) is a collection of six essays in which she ruminates upon her myriad mental wanderings during this unprecedented year.
I found my way to this book in October, as the days darken and the notion of another winter and spring in pandemic proves a persistent damper. I looked forward to read a book all about one writer’s thoughts and observations on this difficult year. As I read this slim book (it is under 100 pages), there were moments I felt Smith’s words reflected my experience in full. At other times, Smith’s observations were wildly different from my own; her experiences are much more metropolitan in scope. Ultimately though, she tackles a wide range of subjects in this collection, and as such there is likely something poignant for any thoughtful reader. As I read these essays, Smith’s thoughts—what is it to be a writer? what are the many plagues we face?—embodied, for me, the diverse nature of what we have faced, in the isolation of our quarantines and inner, mental landscapes, this year.
Intimations touches on the personal, the political, the observed. Smith writes in her foreword: “What I’ve tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events [of 2020], 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” (xi). She digs into what it is to be a writer, especially in these moments when control over our external lives seems utterly unavailable. Living in New York in the weeks leading up to the pandemic and then moving to back to London, Smith’s essays respond to both Trump’s America and Johnson’s England. These essays unpack the metaphors of what plagues us, culturally, and nods to the sickening symptoms. Coronavirus and contempt—racist, classist—are two pandemics 2020 has brought to the fore, and in Intimations Smith eloquently, succinctly, and at times very movingly examines this moment.
Intimations is a fast read. As a series of short essays, it can be read in one sitting or pulled out for those few stolen moments of reading over an extended period of time. Of all the essays, “Something To Do” may have spoken most to me directly. But Smith’s examination of racism, hate crimes, and contempt shook me deeply. She intimates directly, if that is possible, as she delineates those things we all must face this year. Her final essay, “Intimations,” is a list of indirect revelations about people, icons, and heroes, and I can’t pretend to have understood much of it. And yet, something about its method felt perfectly appropriate for this strange year in which so many of us have dug deep within to identify, as we can, what it means to be.
Intimations is just one writer’s response to 2020. I imagine there will be others as writers and thinkers reckon with the nature of this strange, hard year. Zadie Smith’s voice and prose, however, make Intimations a thoughtful read. One that encourages all of us to consider the details we would intimate to others as we reflect on a year that has challenged society and individual in ways we never before imagined.
A Few Great Passages:
“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. [. . . O]ut 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” (6-7).
“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” (28).
“You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly” (73).
Bibliography:
Smith, Zadie. Intimations. Penguin Books: 2020.
