Dear Ali,Â
Iâve loved hearing about your adventures: from haunted hotels, to majestic hikes, to enchiladas with my in-laws in El Paso. (Yes, dear readers, it happened! Ali got to see my husbandâs childhood rock collection.) Soon, youâll arrive in Palo Alto. Perhaps we will see the redwoods, or drink wine in Sonoma. Or weâll simply sit on my back patio and co-write the next great American novel!Â
My last few weeks havenât been as adventurous as yours (I havenât crossed multiple state lines). But theyâve certainly been eventful. Last week, smoke from wildfires turned the sky the color of a sepia photograph. Lacking sunlight, my bougainvillea dropped all its purple flowers and confused crickets started chirping at 3 pm. In Oregon, where my parents live, things were worse: an evacuation order had them packing their car with valuables. (Luckily, they didnât need to leave: you can read more about the fires here.)
At the same time: life persisted. On days with clear air, I drove to Half Moon Bay for a languorous walk by the ocean and a creamy bowl of clam chowder. One afternoon, I biked to the local library and picked up three books that a friendly librarian slid out a window. On the back fence, squirrels and birds fought over seed pods and acorns. I met our new neighbors.Â
At the same time: all of these activities happened in masks, at distances, outdoors.Â
How are we supposed to make sense of everything? The daily joys. The seasonal change. Our almost-unconscious pandemic accommodations. The importance of our countryâs reckonings with race, and climate change, and economic precarity, and the grief that those reckonings have to happen at all. Life feels both unprecedented and inevitable, shockingly familiar (school, work, grocery shopping, phone calls) and undeniably strange.Â
My book recommendation highlights a writer trying (and sometimes, appropriately, failing) to âmake senseâ of it all.
Zadie Smith wrote her latest essay collection, Intimations, during the pandemic. Thatâs right: she started writing these six essays in mid-March, when quarantine began in New York City. (I wish I had been so productive! Our newsletter is a comparable achievement, right?) Penguin Random House published them in a little book, knowing suckers like me (fans of Smithâs novels, short stories, and other essay collections) would jump at the chance to buy even 97 pages of her thoughts.Â
I wasnât disappointed with the purchase. Smith takes the events of the last several monthsâlockdowns, faulty presidential promises, the death of George Floydâand pulls out observations: namely, that âamid the great swath of indiscriminate death, some old American distinctions persistâ along the lines of class and race. âUntimely death,â she writes, âhas a precise physiognomy, location, and bottom line.â
Smith notices other things too. She acknowledges our sudden abundance of time, and our desperate desire not to waste it: thus the banana-bread baking, craft projects, and other artificially imposed tasks. She writes about suffering, about the impossibility of perspective even when we know others have it worse than we do:Â
Suffering is not relative; it is absoluteâŠ. It can not easily be mediated by a third term like âprivilege.âÂ
In a searing postscript, she examines âcontempt as a virusâ:Â
Patient zero of this particular virus stood on a slave ship, four hundred years ago, looked down at the sweating, bleeding, moaning mass below deck and reverse-engineered an emotionâcontemptâfrom a situation that he, the patient himself, had created.
What I like best, though, is when Smith realizes the simultaneous futility and importance of what sheâs doing, i.e., trying to organize a messy world into âtakeaways.â She writes:Â
Writing is routinely described as âcreativeââthis has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creativeâŠ. Writing is control.Â
Writing is artificial. It puts ideas in paragraphs and makes tidy conclusions. But it can also be full of complexities and second-guessing. Thatâs why the essay is a great medium for our current moment: it allows for all of the contradictions, all at once.
A review of Intimations in the New York Times calls out Smithâs wisdom, naming her writerly âspiritâ as oneÂ
born not of a fear of confrontation but a genuine perplexity (of a searching, brilliant kind) at the nature of experience and people, including herself.
May all of us embrace that âperplexityâ (what a fabulous word) this week, and in the weeks to come.
The book:Â Intimations (P.S. 100% of the proceeds are going to charity!)Â
My rating: đ€đ€đ€đ€(four out of five: it could have been longer)
Read more:Â This Zadie Smith essay about Facebook
Love,
Kate