Roger Deakin and Zadie Smith

In the same time lapse I read Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books on Art for Our Sakes, and then work my way fast and respectfully to the Central Asia chapters in Roger Deakin's Wildwood, which do it for me every time. Art, novels, poems, have internal order. Beauty. Tragedy. Human, above all. Reading a novel by Edward P. Jones encouraged Zadie Smith to go to New York and give this talk. For our sakes.

Roger Deakin travels from Almaty, place of apples, capital of Kazakhstan, into the mountains where he meets Valery.

After rattling across several miles of this high savannah we pull up before a mound of wooden beehives, an old Mercedes van and a curvaceous wooden caravan sheathed in sheet steel that could have come straight out of La Strada. I fully expect to see Anthony Quinn ease himself out of it, yawning and stretching in long johns and a buttoned vest after a strenuous night. And I am not disappointed. It is Valery who comes out, looking every inch as good, his eyes slitted against years of steppe and desert sun, shining brown skin stretched over high cheekbones, his face benevolently lined. ... We're intruding on a peaceful, almost monastic life in one of the most beautiful places on earth. ... I'm sad to leave the solitary Valery, whom I instinctively like. When we shake hands, it is the two-handed lingering double-clasp kind with a deep look into the eye. The look says, 'We come from vast distances apart on this earth, yet I feel a natural, spontaneous respect for you. It is very moving, that we far-flung people from different tribes are clearly first natural friends, not enemies at all'. I nearly catch myself making the little speech, but restrain myself in time. 

As Roger Deakin in the hills of Kazakhstan, so Zadie Smith in New York giving a talk at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, confirm what's valuable in us humans on this earth. 

WHAT DO FOURTEEN YEAR-OLDS DREAM NOW

In Third Reich Germany, Charlotte Beradt began to notice how her own dreams expressed what, in a totalitarian state, she was unable to say. She asked others about their dreams, and wrote them down. What we can't say, can emerge in dreams. 

I'm riveted. This is my territory. How does one become a totalitarian subject? What—aside from the threat of violence—are the necessary conditions? Zadie Smith asks in a review of a new English edition of this book of dreams. Now, in our times, do people mistake control for comfort? Are they nesting in algorithms? Are social media sucking out the marrow of our attention? There is much talk from E. Musk about freedom of speech. What has happened to freedom of thought? The OED's word for this year (they add a word every year) is brainrot (from too much mindless screen time). What kind of dreams does brainrot give you?

Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books ends her essay on The Third Reich of Dreams: the nightmares of a nation with an update: a talk she gave to 400 14 year-olds in Barcelona, ostensibly about fiction, but really they wanted to talk about social media. It was hard to get rid of slavery— it took riots, murder, changes in the law — the Third Reich needed world war two to bring it to an end. All you have to do to get rid of social media, she said to her young audience, is to look the other way.