The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last – it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer – there it is.”

Death in life

But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

and hanging on the walls, a plastic countertop contraption

he was the kind of man people liked to entrust with their sadnesses.

“what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You’re the one who has to watch for the open door.”

see how you like sailing. Perhaps you’ll like it better

“moral of the story is, who knows where it all will take you?”

Indeed where will it?

“No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them.”

I did finally meet him – he was as thin and pale as a starved poet.

“My point is like, democracy is excuse for any fucking thing. Violence… greed… stupidity… anything is ok if Americans do it. Right? Am I right?”

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

You could study the connections for years and never work it out – it was all about things coming together, things falling apart, time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness. The stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. — FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD Chapter 7.

We are a disguise to our oen selves

pathetic about it – taking comfort in her left-behind things like

it seems as if you are drawn to what I’ll call for lack of a better term, the metaphysical territory. Such as why do good people suffer,”

Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything – or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder

producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww.

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. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about thei...

It was better never to have been born – never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

I hated being around people, couldn’t pay attention to what anyone was saying, couldn’t talk to clients, couldn’t tag my pieces, couldn’t ride the subway, all human activity seemed pointless, incomprehensible, some blackly swarming ant hill in the wilderness, there was not a squeak of light anywhere I looked, the antidepressants I’d been dutifully swallowing for eight weeks hadn’t helped a bit, nor had the ones before that (but then, I’d tried them all; apparently I was among the twenty percent of unfortunates who didn’t get the daisy fields and the butterflies but the Severe Headaches and the Suicidal Thoughts);

There was no point dwelling on my unreasoning horror of a large public wedding – enclosed spaces, claustrophobia, sudden movements, phobic triggers everywhere, for some reason the subway didn’t bother me so much it had more to do with crowded buildings, always expecting something to happen, the puff of smoke, the fast-running man at the crowd’s margin, I couldn’t even bear being in a movie theater if there were more than ten or fifteen people in it, I would turn around with my fully paid ticket and walk right out.

hoped that the escalating social roar which I’d been riding like a boat in a hurricane would slow, post-wedding, since all I really wanted was to get back to the halcyon days of summer when I’d had Kitsey all to myself: dinners alone, watching movies in bed.

The group mind was such (private jokes and bemusement, everyone clustered round vacation videos on the iPhone) that it was hard to imagine any of them going to a movie by themselves or eating alone at a bar; sometimes, the affable sense of committee among the men particularly gave me the slight feeling of being interviewed for a job. And – all these pregnant women? “Oh, Theo! Isn’t he adorable!” Kitsey unexpectedly thrusting a friend’s newborn at me – me in all sincere horror leaping back as if from a lighted match.

with opiates I was relaxed, I was tolerant, I was up for anything, I could stand pleasantly for hours in unbearable situations listening to any old tiresome or ridiculous bullshit without wanting to go outside and shoot myself in the head.

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.

“Speaks of me? Oh yeah? What’d he say?” No one had called me Potter in years but her soft voice had brought to mind a forgotten word from those old books, the language of snakes and dark wizards: Parseltongue.

“does God have sense of humor? Second question: does God have cruel sense of humor? Such as: does God toy with us and torture us for His own amusement, like vicious child with garden insect?”

the stainless-steel fridge was always well-stocked with Girl Food: hummus and olives, cake and champagne, lots of silly take-out vegetarian salads and half a dozen kinds of ice cream.

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.”

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;

Businessmen silently grabbed up their cases and fled – to their meetings, their marketing plans, their mistresses, who knew?

the baccarat table, in the air-conditioned midnight. There’s always more to things, a hidden level. Luck in its darker moods and manifestations. Consulting the stars, waiting to make the big bets when Mercury was in retrograde, reaching for a knowledge just beyond the known.

Black his lucky color, nine his lucky number. Hit me again pal. There’s a pattern and we’re a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you’d ever looked at or thought of as light.

I didn’t matter much in the scheme of things and Martin didn’t either. We were easily forgotten. It was a social and moral lesson, if nothing else. But for all foreseeable time to come – for as long as history was written, until the icecaps melted and the streets of Amsterdam were awash with water – the painting would be remembered and mourned. Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world. An act of God: that was what the insurance companies called it, catastrophe so random or arcane that there was otherwise no taking the measure of it. Probability was one thing, but some events fell so far outside the actuarial tables that even insurance underwriters were compelled to haul in the supernatural in order to explain them – rotten luck,

in for capital murder. Act of rebellion. Life: vacant, vain, intolerable.

What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever. Why not beat Fate to the punch? Throw the book on the fire and be done with it? There was no end in sight to the present horror, plenty of external, empirical horror to line up with my own endogenous supply; and, given enough dope (inspecting the bag: less than half left), I would happily have set up a fat line and toppled right over: great-souled darkness, explosion of stars.