Ezra Klein in The New York Times:
Sometimes you stumble across a line in a book and think, “Yeah, that’s exactly how that feels.” I had that moment reading the introduction to Zadie Smith’s 2018 book of essays,
“Feel Free.” She’s talking about the political stakes of that period — Brexit in Britain, Donald Trump here — and the way you could feel it changing people. She writes: “Millions of more or less amorphous selves will now necessarily find themselves solidifying into protesters, activists, marchers, voters, firebrands, impeachers, lobbyists, soldiers, champions, defenders, historians, experts, critics. You can’t fight fire with air. But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.”
What Smith is describing felt so familiar. I see it so often in myself and people around me. And yet you rarely hear it talked about — that moment when politics feels like it demands we put aside our internal conflict, our uncertainty, and solidify ourselves into what the cause or the moment needs us to be, as if curiosity were a luxury or a decadence suited only to peacetime.
More here.
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