Inner landscapes in an unsettled universe

Book review of Intimations: Six Essays

A second-hand copy of  Meditations: Living, Dying and the Good Life  lies on my bedside table. It was bought over a decade ago, while on a jaunt through the by-lanes of Daryaganj’s Sunday books bazaar, when my days hardly required philosophical tempering. I was drawn to its diminutive size – a mere rectangle that could fit into the palm of one’s hand.  

In the years that soon ousted the giddily excursive ones, I turned to this diminutive rectangle, a personal journal written by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, probably between 171 and 175 AD in Koine Greek, frequently. The English translation by Gregory Hays was a provider of solace, a gentle admonisher, an unsentimental friend. Its wisdom felt especially useful now, during a pandemic, when one’s mortality was no longer hazily futuristic. 

It was strangely serendipitous then, to discover that one of my favourite authors had also been reading my favourite Stoic. Zadie Smith, whose new collections of essays, Intimations: Six Essays was published in July this year, mentions Meditations in her foreword: “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, not 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.” 

Intimations, her third collection of essays, may or may not be the outcome of the Stoic “practical assistance” she sought. But it is a reflective inner landscape. It is the act of jotting down unsettling thoughts. It is interrogative, and not quite sure of itself. Smith, exquisite architect of interiority, uses the essay as a compact edifice of simple lines, and not one that is sprawling in structure or formidable to enter. She peoples these structures with ordinary lives — her masseur, Ben; a homeless, legless man on Broadway; Barbara, who is nearly  70 years old and has a temperamental little dog. 

Often, these characters from the street or the neighbourhood or in a queue for a sandwich at Subway provide observations on race or class or privilege. In the essay “Suffering Like Mel Gibson”, Smith recalls overhearing a conversation between two working-class women, one African-American and the other South-Asian at a local Subway. The black lady was expressing her astonishment at what she had just seen on 8th Street: A nine-month old child holding an iPad, in a buggy being navigated by a white lady.  “‘Can you believe that shit?’ asked the black lady, and it took everything I had to restrain myself and not join in this horrified assessment of the incompetent parenting of rich people, too lazy or busy to relate to their own babies, giving damaging mind-altering technology to infants.” 
 

Intimations:Six Essays
Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 96
Price: Rs 299

Perhaps her most damning indictment appears in the essay “Postscript: Contempt as a Virus”. She compares contempt to a virus that spreads “…rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly.” She writes with cold precision about the murder of George Floyd, her rage articulated through the virus analogy. She extends the analogy to slavery: “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….” Patient zero of the contempt virus then whips the human beings he has chained, and makes them work in his cotton fields. Smith is searing even though her tone is even, her allegations laid out in modern parables. 

Contempt in its current, most topical form is a virus, but in a previous collection of essays, it acquires the shape of a fence. In Feel Free: Essays, published in 2018, Smith recalls a local primary school in north-west London with a red-brick Victorian building that suddenly adds a fence to the cast-iron railing that marked its boundaries. The British vote for Brexit soon after Smith observes the new fence, and in the essay “Fences: A Brexit Diary,” she outlines the chasms between white, brown and black Londoners, and demolishes the myth of a multicultural city. 

Cities, their familiar streets, parks, bus stops and salons are often sites of unexpected beauty or desolation, or quick conversation in Intimations.  New York will soon be left behind – Smith tells of plans to stay briefly in a friend’s empty cottage in Kerhonkson, before flying to London. Broadway is empty. While walking her dog, Maud, on the last day, Smith longs to hear Barbara say something to her, for she misses New York already. Solace, if any, has perhaps been gleaned from Meditations. 

The last essay, “Intimations: Debts and Lessons” borrows its structure (and spirit) from “Book 1: Debts and Lessons” of Meditations. Both contain a list of creditors; in Smith’s list, Virginia Woolf offers this lesson: 

“To replace that missing layer of skin with language. For as long as that works.”