📕 Intimations

A collection of essays and reflections penned during the early months of 2020, offering a window into the author’s thoughts on the pandemic, race, and the nature of reality.

Smith explores the complexities of communication, both with oneself and with others, and the challenge of finding meaning in a suddenly changed world.

I personally didn’t understand it much and dont remember anything from the book ✨

Author:	Zadie Smith
Year of release:	2020
Genre:	Nonfiction, Essays , Memoir, ShortStories, Contemporary, Biography, Race
Pages:	97
Average WPM:	358
Date Started/Finished:	8 to 9-November-2022
Time took:	0.55 Hours

Summary + Notes

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Foreword

• I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

Chapter 1. Peonies

• 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.

Chapter 2. The American Exception

• 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.

• As Americans never tire of arguing, there may be many areas of our lives in which private interest plays the central role. But, as post-war Europe, exhausted by absolute death, collectively decided, health care shouldn’t be one of them.

Chapter 3. Something to Do

• Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, is an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world – and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand – than by those surrounded by ‘loved ones’. Such art is rare: we can’t all sit cross-legged like Buddhists day and night meditating on ultimate matters.fn2 Or I can’t. But I also don’t want to just do time any more, the way I used to.

• 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

Chapter 4. Suffering Like Mel Gibson

• The temptation to overlay the first discourse upon the second is strong: privilege and suffering have a lot in common. They both manifest as bubbles, containing a person and distorting their vision. But it is possible to penetrate the bubble of privilege and even pop it – whereas the suffering bubble is impermeable.

• Suffering applies itself directly to its subject and will not be shamed out of itself or eradicated by righteous argument, no matter how objectively correct that argument may be.

• By comparing your relative privilege with that of others you may be able to modify both your world and the worlds outside of your world – if the will is there to do it. Suffering is not like that.

• Suffering is not relative; it is absolute. Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual – it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like ‘privilege’. If it could, the CEO’s daughter would never starve herself, nor the movie idol ever put a bullet in his own brain.

A Hovering Young Man

• I always tell my students: ‘A style is a means of insisting on something.’ A line of Sontag’s. Every semester I repeat it, and every year the meaning of this sentence extends and deepens in my mind, blooming and multiplying like a virus, until it covers not just literary aesthetics

• the young man in his twenties is still in peak dreaming season: a thrilling time, an insecure time, even at the best of times. It should be a season full of possibility. Economic, romantic, technological, political, existential possibility. Yes, among all the various relativities to be considered, age is one that can’t be parsed. The style of Cy – the style of all young people – now radically interrupted.