The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

Anybody from New York, in my book they’re an honorary Jew. That’s

More than that: we were creating it. Whatever the drug was making us see, we were constructing it together. And, with that realization, the virtual-reality simulator flipped into color. It happened for both of us at the same time, pop!

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

lidded and sleepy, giving me a sort of dumb, shifty, homeschooled look. I looked like some cult-raised kid just rescued by local law enforcement, brought blinking from some basement stocked with firearms and powdered milk.

Barbours’, where everything was rehearsed and scheduled like a Broadway production, an airless perfection from which Andy had been in constant retreat, scuttling to his bedroom like a frightened squid. By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn’t actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater,

The trick was to address yourself to the projection, the fantasy self—the connoisseur, the discerning bon vivant—as opposed to the insecure person actually

EVERYTHING OF POSSIBILITY. It had been Her Bench since before I was born; in her early days in the city, she had sat there with her library book on her afternoons off, going without

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.

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 for the grave, 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.

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

neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office;...

peaches at the nurs...

It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down—I’d forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying—over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head-snaps where I started up guiltily, whe...

Time had blurred it. It was part of a world that didn’t exist—or, rather, it was as if I lived in two worlds, and the storage locker was part of the imaginary world rather than the real one. It was easy to forget about the storage locker, to pretend it wasn’t there; I’d half expected to open it to find the painting gone, although I knew it wouldn’t be, it would still be shut away in the dark and waiting for me forever as long as I left it there, like the body of a person I’d murdered and stuck in a cellar somewhere.

with my fresh, un-blunted senses the smells were overwhelming, wine and garlic and perfume and sweat, sizzling platters of lemongrass chicken hurried out of the kitchen, and

or, alternately, a cartoon strongman or Mountie blown up by a bicycle pump: cleft chin, doughball nose, tense slit of a mouth, all bunched tight in the center of a face which glowed a plump,

inflamed, blood-pressure pink.

There was a great, seductive loneliness in the hum, a summons almost, like the call of the sea, and for the first time I understood the impulse that had driven my dad to cash out his bank account, pick up his shirts from the cleaners, gas up the car, and leave town without a word. Sunbaked highways, twirled dials on the radio, grain silos and exhaust fumes, vast tracts of land unrolling like a secret vice.

I’d meant to deal with the painting for years, get it back where it belonged, and yet somehow I had kept on and on finding reasons not to. To think of it wrapped and sealed uptown made me feel self-erased, blanked-out, as if burying it away had only increased its power and given it a more vital and terrible form.

haloed by his work lamp, tools arrayed on the walls behind him like Masonic icons. He let me tell him what I had to, and listened quietly while I did it, and when at last he spoke his voice was quieter than usual and without heat.

The old Caveat Emptor rule more than applied there.

Back in Las Vegas, I’d been able to look at it whenever I wanted, when I was sick or sleepy or sad, early morning and the middle of the night, autumn, summer, changing with weather and sun. It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark—a

thing made of light, that only lived in light—was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain. More than wrong: it was crazy.

My moods were a slingshot; after being locked-down and anesthetized for years my heart was zinging and slamming itself around like a bee under a glass, everything bright, sharp, confusing,

and though the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark.

Mrs. Barbour, whose happiness made me feel reassured and nourished in channels of my heart which had stood scraped dry for years. Our news had visibly brightened and straightened

And for all her infectious lightness of heart, I knew it was an extremely petty cavil that Kitsey never seemed very moved by anything.

But nothing ever seemed to strike Kitsey as particularly urgent or emotional

and yet Mrs. Barbour’s restraint, and Andy’s, were somehow very different from Kitsey’s way of making a flippant or trivializing comment whenever anyone brought up something serious. (“No fun,” I’d heard her say with a half-whimsical sigh, wrinkling her nose, when people inquired about her mother.) Then too—I felt morbid and sick even thinking it—I kept watching for some evidence of sorrow about Andy and her dad, and it was starting to disturb me that I hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t their deaths affected her at all? Weren’t we supposed to at least talk about it at some point? On one level, I admired her bravery:

“Oh! No! Of course not!” she said guiltily, grabbing them up and throwing them into her bag like a handful of loose change.

crowds, I felt unsteady and sorrowful; and the ribbon-wrapped buildings, the glitter of windows only deepened the oppressive sadness: dark winter skies, gray canyon of jewels and furs and all the power and melancholy of wealth.

Mommy had had to reduce some of the employees to part time hours, and let the rest of them go. And Daddy—as Platt had confided, when attempting to interest me

Mine, mine. Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist. Fully conscious of my folly, I’d downloaded pictures of it to my computer and my phone so I could gloat upon the image in private, brushstrokes rendered digitally, a scrap of seventeenth-century sunlight compressed into dots and pixels, but the purer the color, the richer the sense of impasto, the more I hungered for the thing itself, the irreplaceable, glorious,

“Right,” I said politely, going into the kitchen and pouring myself a huge vodka.

dumbly-smiling women feeling up their own bellies and guys with infants bound to their chests, would go outside to smoke or else skulk darkly at the margins looking like a drug pusher whenever

In lieu of the pharms I’d been drinking too much and that really wasn’t working for me; 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.

Drunk as I was, his manner had brought me up short: he was looking at me with a peculiar, calculating, uninflected quality I had never seen before.

In the red-carpeted front room, which felt like a room where you’d go to kiss your grandfather on the cheek after being freshly released from prison, large family-style gatherings of drinkers in Louis XVI–style chairs ate and smoked and shouted and pounded each other on the back around tables swagged with metallic gold fabric.

Eugene Onegin

Preserving it in safety. Big important duty in life. You’re telling me,” he said, leaning forward, “you really haven’t opened it up and looked at it? All these years? What is the matter with you?”

For a long, somber moment we looked at each other: high chemical frequency, solitude to solitude, like two Tibetan monks on a mountaintop.

Inside, within the book’s cheery dull world of good citizenship, where persons of different ethnicities

Why does man need government? to impose ideology, punish wrongdoers, and promote equality and brotherhood among peoples

van Winkle wincing and holding his head on the ground about a hundred years too late.

off the hook; no one could blame me; the greater part of