The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. —ALBERT CAMUS

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.”

We looked at each other, for a long strange moment that I’ve never forgotten, actually, like two animals meeting at twilight, during which some clear, personable spark seemed to fly up through his eyes and I saw the creature he really was—and he, I believe, saw me. For an instant we were wired together and humming, like two engines on the same circuit.

Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

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.

“Maybe Mrs. Ingersoll doesn’t let Sabine drink coffee, but it would take a whole lot more than a cup of coffee to get Sabine Ingersoll into Advanced Placement anything.”

Andy character is witty

“As I was saying. It all boils down to lack of confidence. You’re unsure of yourself on the keelboat, Andy,” he said, “and there’s just no darn reason you should be, except you’re short of experience on single-hand sailing.” “No,” said Andy, in his faraway voice. “The problem essentially is that I despise boats.”

“I have tried to like it. I have a natural hatred of it.” “Hatred?” Astonishment; dumbfoundment. “Hatred of what? Of the stars and the wind? Of the sky and the sun? Of liberty?” “Insofar as any of those things have to do with boating, yes.”

I was silent. Andy, I knew, was loyal; I trusted him, I valued his opinion, and yet his conversation sometimes made me feel as though I was talking to one of those computer programs that mimic human response.

turing test

what had caught my eye was the caption under the photo: The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius’s 1654 masterpiece, destroyed.

Usted puede subir con nosotros?”

My dad pushed his plate aside. I noticed that he hadn’t eaten very much—often, with my dad, a sign that he was drinking, or about to start.

What would Thoreau have made of Las Vegas: its lights and rackets, its trash and daydreams, its projections and hollow façades?

Their multi-layered complexity was a sign I couldn’t read, though the general import was clear enough: different tribe, forget about it, I’m way too cool for you, don’t even try to talk to me. Such was my mistaken first impression of the only friend I made when I was in Vegas, and—as it turned out—one of the great friends of my life. His name was Boris. Somehow we found ourselves standing together in the crowd that was waiting for the bus after school that day.

American Government: the bane of his existence. It was a required course—easy even by the desultory standards of our school—but

but trying to get Boris to understand about the Bill of Rights, and the enumerated versus implied powers of the U.S. Congress, reminded me of the time I’d tried to explain to Mrs. Barbour what an Internet server was.

What is the problem with this country? How did so stupid nation get to be so arrogant and rich? Americans… movie stars… TV people… they name their kids like Apple and Blanket and Bear and Bastard and all kind of crazy things.” “And your point is—?” “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?”

That was the other thing about school; at least they fed us. “Too late now.”

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.

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, don’t believe everything he tells you.” Boris chuckled. “I don’t believe everything that anybody tells me,” he said, kicking my foot companionably. “Not even you.”

“Well—” As far as I knew, my father had cleaned up when the Bills had won the week before. “I don’t see how he can be doing too bad. He’s been taking me to Bouchon and places like that.”

Bouchon is a Thomas Keller restaurant in Vegas

will send you to a private school if you want. Boarding school. I could send you to Andover with all that extra money.

Andover Phillips Academy

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! We looked at each other and just laughed; everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were climbing on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.

Popper/Pippa, how had I never noticed the kinship in their names?)

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

Yet Mr. Bracegirdle had been so adamant about boarding school, about fresh air and autumn color and starry skies and the many joys of country life (“Stuyvesant. Why would you stay here and go to Stuyvesant when you could get out of New York? Stretch your legs, breathe a bit easier? Be in a family situation?”) that I’d stayed away from high schools altogether, even the very best ones.

Almost certainly I had ruined the life of some deserving brainiac out in the Bronx—some poor clarinet-playing loser in the projects who was still getting beaten up for his algebra homework, who was going to end up punching tickets in a tollbooth instead of teaching fluid mechanics at Cal Tech because I’d taken his or her rightful place.

‘Feed him,’ Mommy always used to say when Daddy started getting a little too exhilarated. ‘Get some food down him.’ That was always the first line of defense. Sit him down—make him eat a big steak. Often that’s all it took to get him back on keel.

metabolic psychiatry

But I also learned a lesson: a lesson which sifted down to me only by degrees but which was in fact the truest thing at the heart of the business. It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a “correct” price. Objective value—list value—was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn’t matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie’s had recently gone for. An object—any object—was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it.

arfuably true for unique real property as well

As for being “over a barrel”—if anyone gave off the aroma of being embroiled in some sort of ongoing and ill-defined trouble, it was Platt. Though I had not thought of his expulsion in years, the circumstances had been so diligently hushed up that it seemed likely he’d done something fairly serious, something that in less controlled circumstances might have involved the police: which in a weird way reassured me, in terms of trusting him to collect his cash and keep his mouth shut. Besides—it gladdened my heart to think of it—if anyone alive could high-hand or intimidate Lucius Reeve it was Platt: a world-class snob and bully in his own right.

This was the story that would get me put in jail. The French art thief who’d panicked, who’d burned a lot of the paintings he’d stolen (Cranach, Watteau, Corot) had gotten only twenty-six months in prison. But that was France, only shortly after 9/11; and, under the new rubric of federal anti-terrorism laws, the museum thefts carried an additional, more serious charge of “looting of cultural artifacts.” Penalties had grown much stiffer, in America particularly. And my personal life didn’t stand a lot of scrutiny. Even if I was lucky I would be looking at five to ten years.

about the night she’d cried when we made her watch Hellboy instead of Pocahontas,

How could I have believed myself a better person, a wiser person, a more elevated and valuable and worthy-of-living person on the basis of my secret uptown? Yet I had. The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I’d been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any moment blow it apart.

façade

Typo

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;

Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?”

beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time.

That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.