Intimations is a book of personal essays, “small by definition, 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 Jefferson Market Garden. The first book I finished in lockdown was Zadie Smith’s Intimations, a short collection written before 2020 was even halfway done (she dates the foreword from London May 31, the day I moved the book was released in late July, around the time our belongings arrived, delayed by the virus). 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.
The first 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 friends 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 (“fio2 100% Peep at 5”), the family’s ongoing prayers until the end and beyond.
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 from 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 after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. A note I took 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. Since March, I’d felt certain of my capacities diminished. 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 from 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.
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