by
Zadie Smith
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[...] Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you're going.
[...] Probably her husband had his own dull map of roads not traveled. You grow conventional in middle life. Choices made over time present themselves as branches running off the solid oaks that line the overground route to Kensal Rise. You grow gray, and thick in the hips. Yet, on happier days, she saw the same small, high breasts, the same powerful long legs, the familiar and delicious brown animal looking back at her, almost never ill and very strong. How much of this was reality? How much delusion? This was the question of the age, as far as she could tell. And the difference between now and being twenty was she was never sure, not from one moment to the next. Next step Canonbury. Next stop menopause and no more denim. Or was it? Blind worms churning mud through their bodies is a better metaphor for what happens than road not taken or branches unsprouted. But no metaphor will cover it really. It's hopeless.
"We live in love."
But it was ridiculous that they were in love! They were nineteen! What were they gong to do: just stay in love all through college and perhaps even beyond, two people who had grown up practically right next door to each other? Just stick it out all the way to the end, a la some pre-Freudian Victorian novel? Thus missing a myriad of sexual and psychological experiences along the way? That was literally crazy!
"It's not literally crazy. Mum's been with Dad since they were fifteen. She had me when she was seventeen!"
"Darryl, your mum stacks shelves at Iceland."
But how had she let that come out of her mouth!
From above came the noise of the workers laboring, hammering and nailing, creating surplus value for bloated plutocrats, while down below two anarchists [...]
[thought: joke about searching for something with better exchange value, not use value, after someone has finally read marx]
"Only guy I know who still owns a beeper."
McRae looked up over his half-moons with a wide-open, undimmed enthusiasm that made even his gentlest son fear for him.
"Really? A lot of the guys at work have 'em."
"[...] You wanna know the secret? You do it for the feeling you get in the last minute. That's what you're looking for. Look, our lives are easy, right? We switch a button, the light comes on. Press another button, food gets cooked. But you gotta dig deeper than that when you run - into some deeper part of you. That part exists in everyone. Just a matter of finding it again. [...]"
on running marathons
[...] Yet if he could only wipe those American years, that woman ... the wrong path, the years wasted. But what was the kind of pain you just had to live with. He'd give everything on this earth to be twenty-one again, to step into the river of time with Olivia, but have them both be the same age, and have eerything else exactly as it was now, except with those lost years rolled tight in his fist, not yet, unraveled.
[...] When you're young you try to prove you can do it all, anything - you throw everything and the kitchen sink in there! You're profligate! You've got this sense of unlimited potential. You think you contain multitudes, and in my experience you kind of do, at that age, because you're still sufficiently flexible to contain multitudes, you haven't drawn lines around your shit yet and there is still something ineffable about you, something that can make space for whatever is not you. But that crowd inside thins out. Lord, does it thin out. [...]
Mozart’s Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit.
The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don’t know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don’t know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins. The closer you get to the pit, the more you begin to have the sense that what awaits you there will be terrifying. Yet you experience this terror as a kind of blessing, a gift. Your long walk would have had no meaning were it not for this pit at the end of it. You peer over the precipice: a burst of ethereal noise crashes over you. In the pit is a great choir, like the one you joined for two months in Wellington in which you were the only black woman.
Howard hurried to the door, but then turned just before he opened it. ‘Oh – Keeks – ’ His face was childish, apologetic, completely inadequate. It made Kiki suddenly despair. It was a face that placed them right alongside every other middle-aged couple on the block – the raging wife, the rueful husband. She thought: How did we get to the same place as everybody else?