Zadie Smith: “If I truly believed that being a corpse was my only guaranteed future, I’d get rid of…
Zadie Smith: “If I truly believed that being a corpse was my only guaranteed future, I’d get rid of my iPhone”
Zadie Smith’s done it again: her latest New York Review of Books essay, “Man vs. Corpse,” is a gentle, vivid meditation on the impossibility of imagining yourself dead.
Walking corpses — zombies — follow us everywhere, through novels, television, cinema. Back in the real world, ordinary citizens turn survivalist, ready to scale a mountain of corpses if it means enduring. Either way, death is what happens to everyone else. By contrast, the future in which I am dead is not a future at all. It has no reality. If it did — if I truly believed that being a corpse was not only a possible future but my only guaranteed future — I’d do all kinds of things differently. I’d get rid of my iPhone, for starters. Lead a different sort of life.
What is a corpse? It’s what they piled up by the hundreds when the Rana Plaza collapsed in Bangladesh this April. It’s what lands on the ground each time a human being jumps off the Foxconn building in China’s high-tech iPhone manufacturing complex. (Twenty-one have died since 2010.) They spring flower-like in budded clusters whenever a bomb goes off in the marketplaces of Iraq and Afghanistan. A corpse is what individual angry, armed Americans sometimes make of each other for strangely underwhelming reasons[…]
It’s argued that the gap between this local care and distant indifference is a natural instinct. Natural or not, the indifference grows, until we approach a point at which the conceptual gap between the local and the distant corpse is almost as large as the one that exists between the living and the dead. Raising children alerts you to this most fundamental of “first principles.” Up/down. Black/white. Rich/poor. Alive/dead.
Smith covers Renaissance-era Italian painters, long-winded Norwegian memoirist Karl Ove Knausgaard, Tao Lin, Louis C.K., and even — only you, Zadie — one of the biggest feminists in the world.
Of our mindlessness, meanwhile, we hear a lot these days; it’s an accusation we constantly throw at each other and at ourselves. It’s claimed that Americans viewed twelve times as many Web pages about Miley Cyrus as about the gas attack in Syria. I read plenty about Miley Cyrus, on my iPhone, late at night. And you wake up and you hate yourself. My “struggle”! The overweening absurdity of Karl Ove’s title is a bad joke that keeps coming back to you as you try to construct a life worthy of an adult. How to be more present, more mindful? Of ourselves, of others? For others?
[NYRB]