Anaesthetized

I'm listening to English Novelist Zadie Smith speaking about her new book On Beauty on KCRW. Four weeks ago I didn't even know who Smith was. Four weeks ago I drew a blank when Professor Trotter gave a lecture on the difference between plot and story. Four weeks ago, I guessed at the spelling of her name as I touched-typed my lecture notes. So blind, so ignorant.

Tonight I did something I haven't done in a long time: I wandered the internet. Clicking link upon link (how many degrees Kevin Bacon?) I came to a friend of a friend's blog and found this quote:

'But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.'

-Zadie Smith
[Podcast Interview link http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw061109zadie_smith ]

The world is a small place. But it's a purposeful place: an author whose name I had never heard of - whose name I should've - appears unexpectedly before me again. And so what can I do but spend the next half-hour listening to Smith's voice and her poignant analysis of life and literature?

Zadie Smith is a half-Jamaican, half-English working class author. Educated at local state schools, she won a place here at King's College, Cambridge to study English literature. And having barely graduated, she published her first book White Teeth in 2000. It was a bestseller; won the Whitbread First Novel Award; the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, the Betty Trask Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

I listen to Smith tonight and cannot help but feel ashamed. I feel like I'm drowning lately, and struggling for motivation and that passion that God used to bring me here. I am ashamed to say that I've been drowning myself in other things, in things that encourage my mind and heart to be completely passive and numb. Instead of living life, I've been hiding out in the attic room; instead of venturing, I am scared, and I feel like I am wasting so much of my time.

The trouble is is that I've been aware of this state for the past while now and haven't made a move to climb out. Most days it seems easier to watch television shows on my computer and be passive. This is not the person I want to be but it's the easier choice, the road of least resistance. Walking down this road I can forget all about the pain going on in the world, the troubles that happen in real life and be anaesthetized on that table in Eliot's poem. I can do this but in doing so I shut out life's riches, the feeling of being alive.

The truth is is that I'm lonely and still nights and still mornings haunt me.

I listen to Zadie Smith and I wish the tears would just come out.

Posted on November 28, 2006 at 04:50PM