A few stagnant years went by, during which he made halfhearted attempts at starting different collections (coins, china, friends), dabbled in hypochondria, tried to develop an enthusiasm for horses, and failed to become a dandy. Time became a constant itch.
He became fascinated by the contortions of money—how it could be made to bend back upon itself to be force-fed its own body. The isolated, self-sufficient nature of speculation spoke to his character and was a source of wonder and an end in itself, regardless of what his earnings represented or afforded him. Luxury was a vulgar burden. The access to new experiences was not something his sequestered spirit craved. Politics and the pursuit of power played no part in his unsocial mind. Games of strategy, like chess or bridge, had never interested him. If asked, Benjamin would probably have found it hard to explain what drew him to the world of finance. It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details. There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transaction affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion, drawing beautiful patterns on its way into realms of increasing abstraction, sometimes following appetites of its own that Benjamin never could have anticipated—and this gave him some additional pleasure, the creature trying to exercise its free will. He admired and understood it, even when it disappointed him.
The Brevoorts were an old Albany family whose fortune had not kept up with their name. It had taken three generations of failed politicians and novelists to reduce them to a state of dignified precariousness.
Helen felt softly vicious, possessed by a vague desire to do harm. She realized she was peering through the bottom of boredom. There was violence on the other side.
She could hear, again, her solitary steps. She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.
Helen found herself on a street with a few shops. One of them was a double anachronism. A photographic studio could only be an incongruity in that small city, with its Etruscan past that made medieval churches feel new. But on closer inspection, this dissonant apparition from the future revealed itself to be, in fact, old. The portraits in the window, the cameras on display, the services offered—all remitted to the early days of photography. And somehow, Helen experienced those thirty or fifty years by which the shop was outdated more acutely than the twenty centuries elapsed since the city’s foundation.
One of the few traits the Brevoorts had in common, even if for entirely different reasons, was their disdainful lack of curiosity regarding current events. Mrs. Brevoort viewed the irruption of public affairs into her private life as a personal affront. She cared about the administrative, financial, and diplomatic intricacies that kept society going as much as she was concerned about the engine under the hood of a motorcar or the fire room below a steamer’s deck. “Things” should simply “work.” She had no interest in a mechanic explaining to her what the problem was with some greasy piston valve. As for Mr. Brevoort, what could the daily news possibly mean to someone occupied with eternity? Since they both lived on the outskirts of political reality, they did not immediately understand the grave implications of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination.
Her unapproachable silence, which some thought a display of petulance, and her perennial abstraction, which many mistook for sadness, were not passive forms of disobedience but manifestations of ennui.
Intimacy can be an unbearable burden for those who, first experiencing it after a lifetime of proud self-sufficiency, suddenly realize it makes their world complete. Finding bliss becomes one with the fear of losing it. They doubt their right to hold someone else accountable for their happiness; they worry that their loved one may find their reverence tedious; they fear their yearning may have distorted their features in ways they cannot see. Thus, as the weight of all these questions and concerns bends them inward, their newfound joy in companionship turns into a deeper expression of the solitude they thought they had left behind.
Almost by chance, Helen and Benjamin had discovered that they rather enjoyed concerts. What had started as a compromise—music performances, they learned, were the perfect way for them to be seen “out” without having to engage in inane conversations to fill uncomfortable gaps—grew into a passion. As both developed a taste for chamber music, they translated this principle to their own relationship. They organized private recitals at their home, and on these occasions, they could be together, in silence, sharing emotions for which they were not responsible and which did not refer directly to the two of them. Precisely because they were so controlled and mediated, these were Benjamin and Helen’s most intimate moments.
They both knew that, despite their differences, they were uniquely well suited for each other. Until meeting, neither of them had ever known anyone who would accept their idiosyncrasies without questions. Every interaction out in the world had always implied some form of compromise. Now, for the first time, they experienced the relief of not having to adapt to the demands and protocols inherent to most exchanges—or devote part of their attention to the awkwardness that prevailed whenever they refused to follow those conventions. Even more importantly, in their relationship they discovered the joy of mutual appreciation.
Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail—we are ruined by forces beyond our control.
What she dreaded now was that the illness that had possessed, transformed, and consumed her father might also be at work in her brain. She could feel herself think differently and knew that, in the end, it did not matter whether this feeling was based on reality or fantasies. What mattered was that she was unable to stop thinking about her thoughts. Her speculations reflected one another, like parallel mirrors—and, endlessly, each image inside the vertiginous tunnel looked at the next wondering whether it was the original or a reproduction. This, she told herself, was the beginning of madness. The mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth.
Helen seemed calmer in German. Although she spoke it with remarkable ease, she also had vast lacunae, as is usually the case with those who have somewhat haphazardly taught themselves a language. Because she often had to pause and find circumlocutions to bypass grammatical voids and lexical gaps, she gave the impression of having slowed down, of having mastered, in some measure, her anxiety. But her German, like all her foreign languages, had come from unusual sources, detached from everyday speech—outmoded books and the affected chatter of dispossessed aristocrats and drawing room diplomats. This gave her words a baroque, theatrical quality that, to some extent, undid the illusion of sanity created by her slower pace, because, despite her innate elegance, she could sound like a bad actress in too much makeup.
He was pleased to experience, after so many weeks of inactivity, the contraction of time that took place when he lost himself in work. If asked, he would have been unable to say exactly what his thoughts were during that hour, and yet there was an untranslatable clarity to his mental process. During this focused vagueness that preceded all his great business ideas, the world somehow vanished from his senses. Even his self dissolved into the stream of impersonal thoughts.
Mrs. Brevoort was exuberant in her grief, exploring all the social possibilities of mourning. She found unsuspected radiance in the deepest shades of black and made sure to surround herself with particularly plaintive and misty-eyed friends so that she could highlight her arrogant form of sorrow, which she called “dignified.” It is not unlikely that she felt genuine pain under the somewhat farcical spectacle of bereavement she put up for her circle. Some people, under certain circumstances, hide their true emotions under exaggeration and hyperbole, not realizing their amplified caricature reveals the exact measure of the feelings it was meant to conceal.
Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt. We spend the years between these episodes benefiting or suffering from their consequences until the arrival of the next forceful moment. A man’s worth is established by the number of these defining circumstances he is able to create for himself. He need not always be successful, for there can be great honor in defeat. But he ought to be the main actor in the decisive scenes in his existence, whether they be epic or tragic.
Whatever the past may have handed on to us, it is up to each one of us to chisel our present out of the shapeless block of the future.
During my tests and interviews at Bevel Investments I first learned something I had the chance to corroborate many times throughout my life: the closer one is to a source of power, the quieter it gets. Authority and money surround themselves with silence, and one can measure the reach of someone’s influence by the thickness of the hush enveloping them.
Returning to a meaningful place after several decades reveals how alien one can be to oneself.
“Kind of you to come so late. May I offer you something to drink? Champagne?” I repressed my hesitation. There was something cowardly about declining and something awkward in accepting. And I had never had champagne before. “That would be lovely, thank you.” “Well done. Nothing more exhausting than a timid guest.”
Kitsch. Can’t think of Engl. trans. for this word. A copy that’s so proud of how close it comes to the original that it believes there’s more worth in this closeness than in originality itself. “It looks just like...!” Imposture of feeling over actual emotion; sentimentality over sentiment. Kitsch can also be in the eye: “The sunset looks like a painting!” Because artifice is now the ultimate standard, the original (sunset) has to be turned into a fake (painting), so that the latter may provide the measure of the former’s beauty. Kitsch is always a form of inverted Platonism, prizing imitation over archetype. And in every case, it’s related to an inflation of aesthetic value, as seen in the worst kind of kitsch: “classy” kitsch. Solemn, ornamental, grand. Ostentatiously, arrogantly announcing its divorce from authenticity.
Nurse never feigns gaiety. Never makes shows of sympathy. Never pretends to know what I feel. Calling her a friend would be an insult to the dignity of her impersonal care. And yet.
Something miraculous + sad about the glass on the table. Water disciplined into a vertical cylinder. The depressing spectacle of our triumph over the elements.
“Imagine the relief of finding out that one is not the one one thought one was”