
10 aha moments from Zadie Smith’s Swing Time
Don’t laugh, but I set myself the goal of reading 12 books this year — a massive step up from last year’s grand total of 3, but a dismal effort when compared to my future-sister-in-law’s goal of 50.
One a month seems a reasonable attempt in this day and age though, particularly for someone with my eye speed.
Being rather choosy about what I deem worthy to include in my twelve, it made sense to immediately do this — which led to Swing Time.
A few chapters in and I found myself nodding along every other page with the sagacity* hidden in Zadie’s pages. And, because this year is about trying to ground my learning in writing, I decided to make a list of my favourite nuggets of wisdom.
- Please note that there are spoilers in the quotes I’ve used below.
- I highly recommend you read the book in full — it’s a beautifully rich and emotional journey. Seriously, if you live in Melbourne I will happily pass on my copy, otherwise treat yourself.
*sagacity — the newest addition to my vocabulary and basically just another word for wisdom.
1. Sometimes truth isn’t as important as trusting the person who said it.
As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.
Page 36
2. In the age of information, there’s less space to hide in ignorance — except when you choose to shield yourself from things.
That there might be any practical divergence between my mother’s situation and her own did not seem to occur to Aimee, and this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality.
Page 111
3. One fact plus one fact equals two facts, not three.
Like most people in his line of work — like Granger — he had been hired for his height and his colour, for the threat considered implicit in their combination. Two minutes of smoking a cigarette with him revealed a gentle soul on good terms with the universe, ill-suited to his role.
Page 143
4. Happiness is entirely dependent on the metrics you choose to measure life by.
“No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.”
“I don’t see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don’t see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can’t afford one.”
Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly.
“Children can be a kind of wealth,” he said.
Page 253
5. A cry for help doesn’t always look like one.
Tracey turned my way, and smiled, a melancholy but affectionate smile, or maybe it only carried the memory of affection. I saw the seven-, eight-, nine- and ten-year-old in her, the teenager, the little woman. All of these versions of Tracey were reaching across the years of the church hall to ask me a question: What are you going to do? To which we both already knew the answer. Nothing.
Page 266
6. Power by association doesn’t carry the same weight as power itself — but it’s how many of us are taught to find and measure truth.
I did not want to rely on each European fact having its African shadow, as if without the scaffolding of the European fact everything African might turn to dust in my hands.
Page 294
7. Your conception of what’s real will change as fast as your context.
If London was unreal, if New York was unreal, they were powerful stage-shows: as soon as we were back inside them they not only seemed real but the only possible reality, and decisions made about the villages from these locations always appeared to have a certain plausibility while we were making them, and only later, when one or other of us arrived back here, and crossed this river, did the potential absurdity of whatever it was become clear.
Page 299
8. Imposter syndrome is everywhere.
She smirked, confirming the sense I already had that my college life had been some kind of local joke, a poor attempt at playing a role outside of my range, one that had not come off.
Page 328
9. It’s hard to recognise forces or agendas outside your own.
It was more than simply being kept in the dark, it was a rejection of the way I ordered my own reality. For in my mind — as perhaps it is for most young people — I was at the centre of things, the only person with true freedom. I moved from here to there, observing life as it presented itself to me, but everybody else in these scenes, all the subsidiary characters, belong only in the compartments in which I had placed them.
Page 336
10. Time doesn’t stop, even when your heart and mind tells you that the world has ended.
When I was a child she had been immortal. I couldn’t imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric. Instead, this quiet street, these gingko trees shedding their golden leaves.
Page 443
If you’ve read the book, I’d love to know if any of these resonated with you.
If you haven’t, go do that, and then let me know your thoughts.
