in the middle of one spring night said, “WHY NOT WRITING?” I answered myself in my notebook in the morning: “I DON’T WANT ANY OF THESE IDEAS.” I had also not been able to read, not before bed, not on the plane west. Not the celebrated memoir on my nightstand written by a poet who’d famously dined with a tyrant, not the favorite novel I’d turned to during a farewell Zoom conference, where my colleagues all brought parting words of joy Įom their own favorite works, where I compared New York, the town I’d called home for two decades, to the imaginary one called Gilead: “This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes aįer it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope. I love this town.”

1. Reading and Writing Again: On
Zadie Smith’s “Intimations”
By Scott Korb
NOVEMBER 8, 2020
WE LEFT NEW YORK at the end of May. Buying a pre-
owned Subaru in Portland, Oregon, a few weeks later, I
explained to the salesman that the move had been long
planned, by which I meant that we weren’t part of the
exodus om the city prompted by the plague,
something I’d also explained to the handyman repairing
the wall we’d waterlogged by drilling into pipes above
the toilet while hanging a medicine cabinet in our new
apartment.
Since March, I’d felt certain of my capacities
diminished. I had not been able to write. A note I took
a b v g f d
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2. in the middle of one spring night said, “WHY NOT
WRITING?” I answered myself in my notebook in the
morning: “I DON’T WANT ANY OF THESE IDEAS.” I
had also not been able to read, not before bed, not on
the plane west. Not the celebrated memoir on my
nightstand written by a poet who’d famously dined
with a tyrant, not the favorite novel I’d turned to
during a farewell Zoom conference, where my
colleagues all brought parting words of joy om their
own favorite works, where I compared New York, the
town I’d called home for two decades, to the imaginary
one called Gilead: “This whole town does look like
whatever hope becomes a er it begins to weary a little,
then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still
hope. I love this town.”
The rst person close enough for me to have learned
he’d died was the brother of the budget administrator at
work; then it was the superintendent of the building
some iends of mine lived in with their daughter; the
closest so far, which isn’t so close, was a writer and
teacher I once worked with whose sister, a registered
nurse, documented her death on Twitter: their
FaceTime meetings, her ventilator settings (“ o2 100%
Peep at 5”), the family’s ongoing prayers until the end
and beyond.
The dean and her partner both apparently had it, and
though for a week in April I seemed to have lost my
senses of smell and taste, at-home antibody tests we
took to reassure ourselves before the move came back
unreassuringly negative for both me and my wife, and
it was apparently all in my head back then. I still wasn’t
reading.
The rst book I nished in lockdown was Zadie Smith’s
Intimations, a short collection written before 2020 was
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Western in Texas
By Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Zadie Smith’s Rhythmic Play
in Shadow and Light
By Walton Muyumba
The Embassy of Gossip:
Zadie Smith’s First-Person
Plural
By Kaya Genç
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3. even halfway done (she dates the foreword om
London May 31, the day I moved; the book was released
in late July, around the time our belongings arrived,
delayed by the virus). Intimations is a book of personal
essays, “small by de nition, short by necessity,” she
says, written in “those scraps of time the year itself has
allowed.” (Sort of like what you’re reading now.) In
these essays, Smith remembers New York, especially, at
the moment just before lockdown, when, for instance,
in the crisp early spring, she encounters two other
middle-aged women staring at some tulips behind the
bars of Je erson Market Garden. They are drawn there
for a moment by the same “powerful instinct,” she says,
though they all have somewhere else to be. The theme
here, in an essay called “Peonies,” because those are the
owers she wished she had seen instead of the
pedestrian tulips, is the tension between resistance and
submission: controlling our experiences (through
writing, impractically, in large part), versus taking the
world as it comes, which results in an ambivalence she
enacts in a moment on the page: “[O]ut in the eld,
experience has no chapter headings or paragraph breaks
or ellipses in which to catch your breath … it just keeps
coming at you.”
In an essay called “The American Exception,” Smith
quotes the president om late March to expose the
di erence, in America, between “dead people” and
“death absolute”: “I wish we could have our old life
back,” Trump said. “We had the greatest economy that
we’ve ever had, and we didn’t have death.” This
distinction between death and the dead is one of several
themes Smith returns to in Intimations, having dwelled
on it earlier in a 2013 essay about Mark Rothko, Andy
Warhol, and two volumes of Knausgaard’s My Struggle.
In the earlier essay, she tries imagining herself as a
corpse, fails, and then, referring to the rst principles
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4. observed by children, evokes a world lled with many
“strange divisions”: “Up/down. Black/white. Rich/poor.
Alive/dead.”
Oddest of all is the unequal distribution of corpses.
We seem to come om a land where people,
generally speaking, live. But those other people
(o en brown, o en poor) come om a death-
dealing place. What a misfortune to have been born
in such a place!
In the new essay, she resumes. Of dead people in
America, seen as “casualties” and “victims,” “more or
less innocent bystanders,” she writes:
[A]ll of these involved some culpability on the part
of the dead. Wrong place, wrong time. Wrong skin
color. Wrong side of the tracks. Wrong Zip Code,
wrong beliefs, wrong city. Wrong position of hands
when asked to exit the vehicle. Wrong health
insurance — or none. Wrong attitude to the police
o cer.
I don’t know well enough the budget administrator’s
brother or the super of my iends’ building to know of
their American-style culpability, but the teacher and
writer, Rana Zoe Mungin, 30, died a er twice being
sent home om the hospital without a test. Black
herself, she died in the predominately Black,
predominantly poor Brownsville neighborhood of
Brooklyn, where rates of infection are ve times what
they are in the Manhattan neighborhood I le , and
nearly eight times what they are in Greenwich Village,
around Je erson Market Garden — a fact that does not
escape Smith: “The virus map of the New York
boroughs turns redder along precisely the same lines as
it would if the relative shade of crimson counted not
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