Ragtime

by E.L. Doctorow

Some of these men saw the way Evelyn’s face on the front page of a newspaper sold out the edition. They realized that there was a process of magnification by which news events established certain individuals in the public consciousness as larger than life. These were the individuals who represented one desirable human characteristic to the exclusion of all others. The businessmen wondered if they could create such individuals not from the accidents of news events but from the deliberate manufactures of their own medium. If they could, more people would pay money for the picture shows.

I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.

However much money you have gotten from Thaw it is only as much as he wanted to give you. It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them. It is the way things work. Somehow every dollar paid over to you has resulted in his profit. And you will be left with a finite amount of money that you will spend and waste until you are as poor as when you started. She knew this was true.

There was a kind of act that used the real world for its stage. He couldn’t touch it. For all his achievements he was a trickster, an illusionist, a mere magician. What was the sense of his life if people walked out of the theatre and forgot him? The headlines on the newsstand said Peary had reached the Pole. The real-world act was what got into the history books.

He felt if there was something more than he knew, it lay in the past rather than in the present, of whose total bankruptcy of existence he was confident.

I do not think you can be so insolent as to believe your achievements are the result only of your own effort. Did you attribute your success in this manner, I would warn you, sir, of the terrible price to be paid. You would find yourself stranded on the edge of the world and see as no other man the emptiness of the firmament.

Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being. Why can’t you accept your own freedom? Why do you have to cling to someone in order to live?

Thus with continuous concentration and the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy he tried to keep himself from slipping into the vast distances of his unhappiness. It was all around him. It was a darkness as impudently close as his brow. It choked him by its closeness. And what was most terrifying was its treachery. He would wake up in the morning and see the sun coming in the window, and sit up in his bed and think it was gone, and then find it there after all, behind his ears or in his heart.

His simple delight in everything was infectious and soon Mother and Father wore constant smiles on their faces. They had forgotten themselves. It was enormously pleasurable to see the world as the Baron did, alive to every moment.

If the royal families were not melancholic they were hysterical. They overturned wineglasses or stuttered or screamed at servants. He watched. The conviction came over him that they were obsolete. They were all related, from one country to the next. They had been marrying one another for so many centuries that they had bred into themselves just the qualities, ignorance and idiocy, they could least afford. At the funeral of Edward VII in London they had pushed and shoved and elbowed each other like children for places in the cortege.

It seemed to him awesome that someone embodying the power and panoply of an entire empire could be so easily brought down.