Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,135

must assume that David was one of them.

In the end, the truly sublime and frightening moments in Brief Interviews do not involve families joshing each other in Italian restaurants. When he offers his readers generous, healthy interpersonal relations as a route out of “the postmodern trap,” well, that’s the responsible moral philosopher in him. But the real mystery and magic lies in those quasi-mystical moments, portraits of extreme focus and total relinquishment. We might feel more comfortable calling this “meditation,” but I believe the right word is in fact prayer. What else is the man in “Think” doing when he falls on his knees and puts his hands together? What is the Granola Cruncher doing as the psychopath moves on top of her? What is the boy in “Forever Overhead” doing just before he dives? It’s true that this is prayer unmoored, without its usual object, God, but it is still focused, self-forgetful, and moving in an outward direction toward the unfathomable (which the mystic will argue is God). It is the L word, at work in the world. Wallace understood better than most that for the secular among us, art has become our best last hope of undergoing this experience.

“Church Not Made with Hands” is a gift of this kind. It is about extreme focus and it requires extreme focus. In its climactic scene, a priest kneels praying in front of a picture of himself praying, which feels like the ultimate DFW image, as DeLillo’s most-photographed barn holds within it something of the essential DeLillo. “Church Not Made with Hands” is my favorite gift in a book laden with them. I think that must be why I’m loathe to take it apart as I have the others. More than any other story in Brief Interviews it seals its doors tightly and the joy for each reader will come in finding the keys that fit the locks—and who’s to say your keys you will be the same as mine? Still, here are a few of mine, in case you feel like picking them up.

Giorgio de Chirico painted what he called “metaphysical town squares.” They are full of exquisite renderings of shadow.

The intense colors of a Soutine. In fact, colors generally. Count them.

In volume five of A la recherché du temps perdu, the novelist Bergotte dies while standing in a gallery, looking at Vermeer’s View of Delft. These are his last words: “That’s how I ought to have written, my last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of color, made my language precious in itself.”

Just before a partial eclipse, the wind rises. And another thing happens, too: shadow bands (also known as flying shadows) appear, making the ground look like the bottom of a swimming pool.

Solar eclipse. The Nazca Lines in Peru. “Eye in the sky.”

“The screen breaths mint”? A confessional box. A priest chewing gum.

From the OED:

Prone

a. ORIGIN. French prône, the grating or railing separating the chancel of a church from the nave, where notices were given and addresses delivered.

b. Ecclesiastical history. An exhortation or homily delivered in church. Also, prayers, exhortations, etc., attached to a sermon.

c. Adjective & adverb. Directed or sloping downward. Also loosely, descending steeply or vertically, headlong.

d. Facing downward; bending forward and downward; lying face downward or on the belly; spec. (of the hand or forelimb) with the palm downwards or backwards and the radius and ulna crossed. Later also loosely, lying flat.

From the OED:

Apse, Apsis

Astronomy: Either of the two points in the elliptical orbit of a planet or other body at which it is respectively nearest to and furthest from the primary about which it revolves. Architecture. A large semicircular or polygonal structure, often roofed with a semi-dome, situated esp. at the end of the choir, nave, or an aisle of a church.

A song by The Waterboys

C. S. Lewis. Shadowlands

A Grief Observed. Death

Acts 17:24: God dwelleth not in temples made with hands.

Acts 7:48: Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands?

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE 1962-2008

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Zora Neale Hurston: What Does Soulful Mean?” was originally conceived as an introduction for the Virago edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God and appeared subsequently in a revised version in The Guardian. “Middlemarch and Everybody” and “Hepburn and Garbo” were first published in The Guardian. “E. M. Forster: Middle Manager,” “F. Kafka, Everyman” and “Two Directions for the Novel” were published in The New York Review of Books. “Speaking in Tongues” was given as the 2008 Robert B. Silvers