Feel Free Essays
Reviews
Finally finished off the last few essays.
Conflicted feelings yet again!! Zadie Smith is a phenomenal writer - even in what I consider to be her filler pieces, there are sentences that are so poignantly strung together that they deserve not only to be underlined but also sent to friends, shared on social media, documented in a separate journal for easy re-reading etc - but the entire thing just could have been a whole lot shorter for me. Long, meandering sentences. A surplus of examples that don't always tie back to the main thesis. Topics that I'm not necessarily knowledgeable in or interested in learning more about. Maybe at the end of the day, this was all just an unfortunate mismatch. I could see why others would like it but I can only imagine someone truly appreciating it if they've lived in Smith's exact same context.
Highlights
What looked like love had just been teen spirit. But what a wonderful thing, to sit on a high wall, dizzy with joy, and think nothing of breaking your ankles.
But it's my sense that no matter howy many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is the family' is always an event of some violence. It's only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.
Why must either life or work be perfect? Writers, like everybody else, are stumbling through this world, constantly re-examining the checks and balances of their choices, knowing they are helping here but hurting there. In my life, at least, the flesh-and- blood 'I' and the I-who-is-not-me stumble equally, neither ever coming close to perfection. But I feel extremely fortunate to be engaged in this lifelong project concerning their inter-relation, communication, mutual rejection and argument. IfI can keep saying T both ways for even half as long as Mr Roth managed it, I will count myself a very fortunate woman indeed.
Is it possible that what men consider enigmatic in women is actually agency? As in: Ifshe does not what the hell does she want? In room after room at the Louvre we will nt me, find painted women receptive to our gaze, applying for it, offering themselves up for judgement, whether it is the judgement of Paris or Cupid or Brian who just this minute got off the Eurostar. But the most famous portrait in the place, the exceptional portrait, is the one of the woman who doesn't appear to want our gaze or need it or even to know we're there. The woman who is in her own world, occupied with her own unknowable thoughts, though she is every hour surrounded by iPhone-wielding tourists. The woman who has ceased to be - or never was - concerned with whether or not you are looking at her. The woman with other things on her mind. Who has, precisely, mind!
There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happerning to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words.
Elergy for a Country’s Seasons