The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

Daddy lifted me up on the fairgrounds and told me to look at the moon. ‘When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.’ So after he died, and I had to go to Aunt Bess – I mean, even now, in the city, when I see a full moon, it’s like he’s telling me not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.” She kissed me on the nose. “Or where you are, puppy. The center of my earth is you.”

When we are sad – at least I am like this – it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don’t change. Your descriptions of the desert – that oceanic, endless glare – are terrible but also very beautiful. Maybe there’s something to be said for the rawness and emptiness of it all. The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I’m reminded of the past at every turn. But when I think of you, it’s as if you’ve gone away to sea on a ship – out in a foreign brightness where there are no paths, only stars and sky.

None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?”

Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved.

Little bird; yellow bird.

But inwardly I was almost drunk at the lift in his mood – the same flood of elation I’d felt as a small child when the silences broke, when his footsteps grew light again and you heard him laughing at something, humming at the shaving mirror.

I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.

I know you’ve been through a lot but there’s no need in the world to fuss about it now.

no matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture – for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk, in my darting sideways glance as I left the restaurant with Hobie, the very set of my head recalling his old, preening habit of checking himself out in any mirror-like surface.

feeling sick to think of another person ruined by the same poison of why did I and if only that had wrecked my own life.

Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital.

All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness.

hey, little buddy! you are here to teach me everything!

Unsettled heart. The fetishism of secrecy. These people understood – as I did – the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self, all the hidden consolations that lifted life above the ordinary and made it worth living.

“Hard to put things right. You don’t often get that chance. Sometimes all you can do is not get caught.”

a sadness you felt in your stomach first, beating on the inside of the forehead, all the darkness I’d shut out roaring back in.

and it was an utter delight to be with her, I loved her every minute of every day, heart and mind and soul and all of it, and it was getting late and I wanted the place never to close, never.

Safe trip. I love you. No kidding.

If we lose, we win, and if we win, we win! Everything is good!

in whatever wink of consciousness that remained to me I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and receding into the grand immensities like an emperor, gone, gone, observing all the distant scurryers on shore, freed from all the old human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death.

Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever.

You know what Picasso says. ‘Bad artists copy, good artists steal.’

if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it?

coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?”