The Measure of Our Lives Read online

  ALSO BY TONI MORRISON

  Fiction

  The Bluest Eye

  Sula

  Song of Solomon

  Tar Baby

  Beloved

  Jazz

  Paradise

  Love

  A Mercy

  Home

  God Help the Child

  Nonfiction

  Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

  The Origin of Others

  The Source of Self-Regard

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2019 by The Estate of Chloe A. Morrison

  Foreword copyright © 2019 by Zadie Smith

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  A version of the Foreword first appeared as “Daughters of Toni: A Remembrance” by Zadie Smith in PEN America as part of “Tribute to Toni Morrison (1931–2019)” on August 7, 2019.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952413

  ISBN 9780525659297 (hardcover) | EBOOK ISBN 9780525659303

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The measure of our lives : a gathering of wisdom / Toni Morrison ; foreword by Zadie Smith.

  Names: Morrison, Toni, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190202149 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190202165 | ISBN 9780735280236 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735280243 (HTML)

  Subjects: LCSH: Morrison, Toni—Quotations.

  Classification: LCC PS3563.O8749 M43 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  Cover photograph by Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images

  Cover design by John Gall

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Toni Morrison

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Publisher’s Note

  The Measure of Our Lives

  Attributions

  A Note About the Author

  FOREWORD

  I READ TONI MORRISON’S EARLY NOVELS very young, probably a little too young, when I was around ten years old. I couldn’t always follow her linguistic experiments or the density of her metaphoric expressions, but at that age what mattered more even than her writing was the fact of her. Her books lined our living room shelves and appeared in multiple copies, as if my mother was trying to reassure herself that Morrison was here to stay. It’s hard now, in 2019, to recreate or describe the bottomless need she answered. There was no “black girl magic,” in London, in 1985. Indeed, as far as the broader culture was concerned, there was no black girl anything, outside of singing, dancing, and perhaps running. On my mother’s shelves there certainly were “black woman writers,” and “Toni” was first amongst them, but no such being was ever mentioned in any class I ever attended, and I can’t remember ever seeing one on the TV or in the papers or anywhere else. Reading The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby for the first time was therefore more than an aesthetic or psychological experience, it was existential. Like a lot of black girls of my generation, I placed Morrison, in her single person, in an impossible role. I wanted to see her name on the spine of a book and feel some of the same lazy assumption and smug confidence of familial relation, of inherited potential, that any Anglo-Saxon boy in school felt—no matter how unlettered or indifferent to literature—whenever he heard the name of William Shakespeare, say, or John Keats. No writer should have to bear such a burden. What’s extraordinary about Morrison is that she not only wanted that burden, she was equal to it. She knew we needed her to be not just a writer but a discourse and she became one, making her language out of whole cloth, and conceiving of each novel as a project, as a mission—never as mere entertainment. Just as there is a Keatsian sentence and a Shakespearean one, so Morrison made a sentence distinctly hers, abundant in compulsive, self-generating metaphor, as full of sub-clauses as a piece of 19th century presidential oratory, and always faithful to the central belief that narrative language—inconclusive, non-definitive, ambivalent, twisting, metaphorical narrative language, with its roots in oral culture—can offer a form of wisdom distinct from and in opposition to, as she put it, the “calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science.”

  The thwarting of human potential was her great theme, but there was nothing subconscious or accidental about it—she couldn’t afford there to be. In The Bluest Eye, for example, how do you write about self-loathing without submitting to the same? Or demonizing the habit? Or handing the power of victory precisely to the culture that has created the feeling? All of it had to be thought through, and she thought about all of it, as a working novelist but also as a critic and academic. To me the most astonishing section of her final book of essays, The Source of Self- Regard, is the level of sustained academic critique she was able to bring to bear upon her own novels, like an architect walking you through a building she’d made, with the same consciousness of its beauty but also of its use. Toni Morrison put herself in the service of her people, as few writers have ever been called upon to do, and she claimed it as a privilege. A large part of the project was the ennobling of black culture itself and its deliberate encasement in a vocabulary worthy of its glories. To those who considered the entrance to her buildings narrow she had many famous rejoinders. And now—in no small part because of her determination not to be swayed from her project—we of course understand that there are no such things as narrow entrances into the houses of history, experience, and culture. For when it comes to ways of telling, ways of seeing, every man’s story is infinite. Every black woman’s, too. This infinite terrain is what she opened up for girls like me who had feared otherwise.

  Zadie Smith, August 7, 2019

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Through bricolage—construction or creation from a diverse range of available things—this brief book aims to limn the totality of Toni Morrison’s literary vision and achievement. It dramatizes the life of her mind by juxtaposing quotations, one to a page, drawn from her entire body of work, both fiction and nonfiction—from The Bluest Eye to God Help the Child, from Playing in the Dark to The Source of Self-Regard.

  Its sequence of flashes of revelation—remarkable for their linguistic felicity, keenness of psychological observation, and philosophical profundity—addresses issues of abiding interest in Morrison’s work: the reach of language for the ineffable; transcendence through imagination; the self and its discontents; the vicissitudes of love; the whirligig of memory; the singular power of women; the original American sin of slavery; the bankruptcy of racial oppression; the humanity and art of black people.

  “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

  “My nature is a quiet one, anyway. As a child I was considered respectful; as a young woman I was called discreet. Later on I was thought to have the wisdom maturity brings.”

  “Don’t you remember being young, when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answe
rs burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?”

  “Long ago she had given up trying to be deft or profound or anything in the company of people she was not interested in, who didn’t thrill her.”

  “Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”

  “Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter—like the throb of a heart made of jelly.”

  “We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

  “In a way, her strangeness, her naïveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”

  “They ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze, which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four leaf-locked trees which promised cooling, they flung themselves into the four-cornered shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly.”

  “I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer—its dust and lowering skies.”

  “The visionary language of the doomed reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which language of the blessed and saved cannot compete.”

  “Language, when finally it comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.”

  “Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.”

  “In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.”

  “He couldn’t stay there surrounded by a passel of slaves whose silence made him imagine an avalanche seen from a great distance. No sound, just the knowledge of a roar he could not hear.”

  “I welcomed the circling sharks but they avoided me as if knowing I preferred their teeth to the chains around my neck my waist my ankles.”

  “You accepted like a beast of burden the whip of a stranger’s curse and the mindless menace it holds along with the scar it leaves as a definition you spend your life refuting although that hateful word is only a slim line drawn on a shore and quickly dissolved in a seaworld any moment when an equally mindless wave fondles it like the accidental touch of a finger on a clarinet stop that the musician converts into silence in order to let the true note ring out loud.”

  “Definitions belonged to the definers, not the defined.”

  “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.”

  “Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”

  “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to.”

  “Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: …she knew there was nothing to fear.”

  “The City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.”

  “There, in the process of writing, was the illusion, the deception of control, of nestling up ever closer to meaning.”

  “Hospitality is gold in this City; you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don’t know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.”

  “It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”

  “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”

  “All narrative begins for me as listening. When I read, I listen. When I write, I listen—for silence, inflection, rhythm, rest.”

  “The words dance in my head to the music in my mouth.”

  “There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

  “There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.”

  “Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all by themselves with no help from the mind.”

  “She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.”

  “Lonely, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.”

  “Lonely was much better than alone.”

  “The sun and the moon shared the horizon in a distant friendship, each unfazed by the other.”

  “Narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination. In this iteration, for me the author, Beloved the girl, the haunter, is the ultimate Other. Clamoring, forever clamoring for a kiss.”

  “The danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility of becoming a stranger. To lose one’s racial-ized rank is to lose one’s own valued and enshrined difference.”

  “What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

  “As writers, what we do is remember. And to remember this world is to create it.”

  “A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath. So they believe.”

  “What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”

  “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.”

  “The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt
with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”

  “Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light In here? Say, who owns this house? It’s not mine. I dreamed another, sweeter, brighter With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats; Of fields wide as arms open for me. This house is strange. Its shadows lie. Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?”

  “Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake—otherwise it just walks on in your door.”

  “I can be miserable if I want to. You don’t need to try and make it go away. It shouldn’t go away. It’s just as sad as it ought to be and I’m not going to hide from what’s true just because it hurts.”