Excerpts: On Beauty
The flight from the rational, which was everywhere in evidence in the new century, none of it had surprised Howard as it had surprised others, but each new example he came across -- on the television, in the street and now in this young man -- weakened him somehow. His desire to be involved in the argument, in the culture, fell off. The energy to fight the philistines, this is what fades.
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Kiki recalled being invincible and truth-loving and twenty years old; remembered feeling exactly this: that if her family could only speak the truth, together they would emerge, weeping but clear-eyed, into the light.
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Her accent, to Levi's ears, was a shameful, comic thing. To Levi, black folk were city folk. People from the islands, people from the country, these were all peculiar to him, obstinately historical -- he couldn't quite believe in them. Like when Howard took the family to Venice and Levi could not shift the idea that the whole place and everybody in it were having him on. No roads? Water taxis? He felt the same way about farmers, anybody who wove anything and his Latin teacher.
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From On Beauty, Zadie Smith
