Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

The Granola Cruncher is one of the few people in Brief Interviews not using another person as an example or as an object or as a piece of “moral gymnastic equipment.” She exists in a quite different moral realm from the manipulator who uses his deformed arm, his “flipper,” as bait to “catch” sympathetic women who then sleep with him, or the guy who twists Viktor Frankl’s holocaust memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, into a perverse apologia for destroying another human being. (Frankl’s therapeutic school, logotherapy, explores the idea that selves in an extreme state of personal degradation or loss are often better able to comprehend what is really meaningful. But this, of course, does not mean you create a second holocaust in order to generate meaning.) Most of Wallace’s people refuse, even for a moment, to give up the self. They have been taught “that a self is something you just have,” like you have a car, or a house, or a bank account. But selves are not consumer items, and the journey to becoming “a fucking human being” is one that lasts as long as our lives: “The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle… Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” Those quotes are from a talk Wallace gave on Franz Kafka, another writer for whom he felt a deep affinity. Their connection is not obvious at the level of sentence but their deep currents run parallel: the attachment to parables, the horror of the self in its fullness (think of the cipher Georg dashing from his charismatic father in “The Judgment,” vaulting over that bridge), the dream of self-less-ness. And despite their attempts to root themselves in “relationships between persons” they both expressed a longing for the infinite, which is nothing and is nowhere and is endless. Throughout this essay, which I began writing when Wallace was alive, I have defined that longing as purely philosophical-events have shown this to be wishful thinking on my part. The story “Suicide as a Sort of Present” now inevitably resonates beyond itself, but it is also the same story it always was: a reminder that there exist desperate souls who feel that their nonexistence, in the literal sense, would be a gift to those around them. We must assume that David was one of them.

In the end, the truly sublime and frightening moments in Brief Interviews do not involve families joshing each other in Italian restaurants. When he offers his readers generous, healthy interpersonal relations as a route out of “the postmodern trap,” well, that’s the responsible moral philosopher in him. But the real mystery and magic lies in those quasi-mystical moments, portraits of extreme focus and total relinquishment. We might feel more comfortable calling this “meditation,” but I believe the right word is in fact prayer. What else is the man in “Think” doing when he falls on his knees and puts his hands together? What is the Granola Cruncher doing as the psychopath moves on top of her? What is the boy in “Forever Overhead” doing just before he dives? It’s true that this is prayer unmoored, without its usual object, God, but it is still focused, self-forgetful, and moving in an outward direction toward the unfathomable (which the mystic will argue is God). It is the L word, at work in the world. Wallace understood better than most that for the secular among us, art has become our best last hope of undergoing this experience.

“Church Not Made with Hands” is a gift of this kind. It is about extreme focus and it requires extreme focus. In its climactic scene, a priest kneels praying in front of a picture of himself praying, which feels like the ultimate DFW image, as DeLillo’s most-photographed barn holds within it something of the essential DeLillo. “Church Not Made with Hands” is my favorite gift in a book laden with them. I think that must be why I’m loathe to take it apart as I have the others. More than any other story in Brief Interviews it seals its doors tightly and the joy for each reader will come in finding the keys that fit the locks-and who’s to say your keys you will be the same as mine? Still, here are a few of mine, in case you feel like picking them up.

Giorgio de Chirico painted what he called “metaphysical town squares.” They are full of exquisite renderings of shadow.

The intense colors of a Soutine. In fact, colors generally. Count them.

In volume five of A la recherché du temps perdu , the novelist Bergotte dies while standing in a gallery, looking at Vermeer’s View of Delft. These are his last words: “That’s how I ought to have written, my last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of color, made my language precious in itself.”

Just before a partial eclipse, the wind rises. And another thing happens, too: shadow bands (also known as flying shadows) appear, making the ground look like the bottom of a swimming pool.

Solar eclipse. The Nazca Lines in Peru. “Eye in the sky.”

“The screen breaths mint”? A confessional box. A priest chewing gum.

From the OED:

Prone

a. ORIGIN. French prône, the grating or railing separating the chancel of a church from the nave, where notices were given and addresses delivered.

b. Ecclesiastical history. An exhortation or homily delivered in church. Also, prayers, exhortations, etc., attached to a sermon.

c. Adjective & adverb. Directed or sloping downward. Also loosely, descending steeply or vertically, headlong.

d. Facing downward; bending forward and downward; lying face downward or on the belly; spec. (of the hand or forelimb) with the palm downwards or backwards and the radius and ulna crossed. Later also loosely, lying flat.

From the OED:

Apse, Apsis

Astronomy: Either of the two points in the elliptical orbit of a planet or other body at which it is respectively nearest to and furthest from the primary about which it revolves. Architecture. A large semicircular or polygonal structure, often roofed with a semi-dome, situated esp. at the end of the choir, nave, or an aisle of a church.

A song by The Waterboys

C. S. Lewis. Shadowlands

A Grief Observed . Death

Acts 17:24: God dwelleth not in temples made with hands.

Acts 7:48: Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands?

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE 1962-2008

Zora Neale Hurston: What Does Soulful Mean?” was originally conceived as an introduction for the Virago edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God and appeared subsequently in a revised version in The Guardian. “Middlemarch and Everybody” and “Hepburn and Garbo” were first published in The Guardian. “E. M. Forster: Middle Manager,” “F. Kafka, Everyman” and “Two Directions for the Novel” were published in The New York Review of Books. “Speaking in Tongues” was given as the 2008 Robert B. Silvers Lecture at the New York Public Library and published in a revised version by The New York Review of Books. “That Crafty Feeling” was given as a lecture at Columbia University, commissioned by Ben Marcus, and later published in The Believer. A revised version appears here. “One Week in Liberia” was the fruit of a trip organized and funded by Oxfam. It was published by The Observer. “At the Multiplex, 2006” and “Notes on Oscar Weekend” were published by The Sunday Telegraph . “Accidental Hero” appeared in a short version in The Sunday Telegraph and appears in full here. “Smith Family Christmas” was commissioned by The New York Times and “Dead Man Laughing” was published by The New Yorker. “Rereading Barthes and Nabokov” began life as a lecture, given at Harvard University, although it has been revised so extensively almost nothing of the original remains.