What to do with all this time?
“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.”
Photo of Intimations x Zadie Smith
I’m not sure where I fall on Zadie Smith the author or public figure.
I liked NW well enough but was ambivalent about On Beauty. I really didn’t enjoy Swing Time and have felt some kind of way about some of Zadie’s essays that have to do with the specificness of Black American life. All that being said, she’s still very much a writer I will read and even seek out. When I heard that she had written and published something during All of This, I knew I wanted to read it. I was fortunate that my public library system (the award-winning San Francisco Public Library system) had it and that I was able to check it out so quickly.
Intimations is a short collection of six essays that range from exploring those first uneasy weeks of the new normal to people she encounters navigating this new world we all find ourselves in. It’s an opportunity to listen in on a famed writer’s internal monologue and it was affirming to listen to many of my feelings and spiraling thoughts, reflected back to me, tidier, and more potent, in Zadie’s incomparable prose. One of her essays, “The American Exception”, was previously printed in The New Yorker and provides a good sampling of the other five essays in this collection. It’s both inspiring and frightening to read commentary on the still-unfolding global merde show. I’ve struggled with how to make meaning, if not sense from this [insert your favorite adjective to describe 2020] time.
The fact that Zadie was able to fight through a fog of complacency and despondency to put pen to paper makes me want to find a way to contribute, in my small way, to the archives of what inevitably will come from this time. It likely won’t be in the bagels I’ve sworn myself to perfect, or even in the little pieces of art, I’ve tried to make to make sense of the madness of 2020. Like Zadie, “I can’t rid myself of the need to do something, to make something, to feel that this new expanse of time hasn’t been wasted. Still, it’s nice to have companions watching this manic desire to make, or grow, or do something that now seems to be consuming everybody.”
I finished this quick audiobook emboldened to keep trying to create during this time, comforted to know that I’m not the only one struggling with what to do with all this time…
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