Zadie Smith

This essay came really late in the book because I do not want to be known as the lady who hated the internet because it's not true, first of all.

But I started this essay, which was meant to be just about time, and I realized my feelings about time and the way I experience it have changed over the years because of the different mediums I've been involved with.

So this begins with a photograph.

Me and my friends on WhatsApp are looking at a photograph of a newborn baby and realizing that

The baby is now 15 and so much time has passed.

I should say we're all in these photos hanging out with this newborn baby.

How young we looked.

How absolutely childlike.

Except we were not especially young even then.

The queer kids, the club kids, the sellouts, the procreators, the artists, the nine-to-fivers, the unemployed, the rich and the poor, the black and the white and the neither.

We and everybody we knew was 30 or thereabouts.

We all still dressed like teenagers, though, and in the minds of the popular culture were slackers, suffering from some form of delayed development, possibly the sad consequence of missing such key adulting experiences as a good war or a stock market crash.

We defended ourselves against such critiques, but privately were a bit sheepish about living at the end of history.

We felt history belonged to other people, that we lived in a time of no time

We had some very peculiar ideas about time generally.

It was like we were incapable of properly gauging its passing.

Take that moment my brother called me to announce he was having a baby, aged 27.

I reacted as if he were a teenage father.

Really couldn't have been more astounded.

This tendency to be utterly amazed by any sign of time moving forward has continued.