The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

At this question, I felt a sharp rush of despair—for as bad as I felt there was nothing he could do for me, and from his face, I realized he knew that, too.

Why hadn’t I insisted we get breakfast instead of going to the museum?

He’s bargaining?

Over and over, I kept thinking I’ve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can’t.

It must be so hard to be a young kid and be so intelligent and gifted but still young in maturity and parental attachment. Theo has an idea of home — his apartment, his mother, his routines — that are now completely uprooted and will never be the same. On top of it all, he is in an unfamiliar home where routines and norms are different. On top of that, too, he has the burden of being a guest and not wanting to be imposing on the Barbours. It’s a lot to cope with all at once for a little boy.

How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me?

I feel so sad reading this. He is a gifted boy, displaced without his mother, in completely new surroundings, learning how to live life in a new way at such a young age. It's a lot. If I were him, I would be longing for the past because it was objectively better.

“You too,” I said, “tell everybody I said hi,” but she’d already hung up.

He feels left behind and abandoned by the Barbours', nobody will come save him. If someone were to come save him, presumably it would be them -- they have money and thus time and resources.

He grinned—exposing bloody teeth—and elbowed me in the ribs. “Nyah, I need a drink before I face Xandra. Come on, Potter. Couldn’t you use a wind-me-down? After all that?”

I get the sense that Theo is more worried and nervous than Boris. Boris is so carefree and blaze about everything. His dad just beat him and he is in good spirits. Theo seems confused and irritated because of Boris' attitude toward these things. Theo has experienced violence in the home from his father, and he seems to have a more timid, avoidant approach wherease Boris is indifferent and seems to accept that as a fact of life.

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.

“Your enemy—my enemy. If you hate him, I hate him too. But—” he put his head to the side—“here I am. Staying in his house. What should I do? Should I talk, be friendly and nice? Or disrespect him?” “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.”

This is really interesting! Boris says "your enemy, my enemy," as if he is undoubtedly loyal to Theo. But right after, he says he doesn't believe anything anyone says completely, not even Theo. It leaves us guessing as to how close Boris feels to Theo. I also find it interesting that Theo and Boris have such different definitions of what is an unforgivable offense, based on cultural background.

I was silent. How had I gone from AP everything to being lumped in with a derelict like Kotku?

IDENTITY CRISIS!!!!

and joked around all the way to the bus stop. I knew people would think the wrong thing if they knew, I didn’t want anyone to find out and I knew Boris didn’t either, but all the same he seemed so completely untroubled by it that I was fairly sure it was just a laugh, nothing to take too seriously or get worked up about.

Interesting take on masculinity and others’ perceptions. To me it does sound a little homoerotic but Iliad also see that it is innocent affection and comfort. Neither of them really get any comfort or security in their home lives and it’s a shame that the security found in one another is now at stake because of Kotku.

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.

Parallels are being drawn between the goldfinch and Theo. The artist and Theo, with the explosion. Theo feeling stuck in one place and how miserable it ought to be.

“I’m not blaming anything on your mom, I’m way past that. It’s just that she loved you so much, I always felt like kind of an interloper with you guys. Stranger-in-my-own-house kind of thing. You two were so close—” he laughed, sadly—“there wasn’t much room for three.”

It’s cool that he’s owning up and being vulnerable about his honest feelings, but it also was his doing since Theo and his mother really banded together because his dad was an antagonist in their home.

“God bless.”

Oooooh okay. His dad was being nice to him because he knew he was in trouble. He needs to get on Theos good side so Theo can help him get out of whatever trouble he got himself into.

HIS DAD IS HORRIBLE!

the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I’d never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street—which was, of course, I love you.

This feels way more real than the scene where he kisses pippa. Pippa felt like a superficial thing and emotionally charged, but this feels deep and meaningful and special. Ah the homoeroticism

I had slipped into a sort of forgetful doze, a skewed, dreamlike version of my former life where I walked familiar streets yet lived in unfamiliar circumstances, among different faces; and though often walking to school I thought of my old, lost life with my mother—Canal Street Station, lighted bins of flowers at the Korean market, anything could trigger it—it was as if a black curtain had come down on my life in Vegas.

I could not envision him preparing in any way to earn a living or to be a productive member of society. And yet to be with Boris was to know that life was full of great, ridiculous possibilities—far bigger than anything they taught in school.

Character Development! Gifted kid decenters academia

And the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world that I’d taken for granted: familiar faces, glad greetings: hey manito! For I had thought that this last touchstone of the past, at least, would be where I’d left it. It was weird to think I’d never be able to thank Jose and Goldie for the money they’d given me—or, even weirder, that I’d never be able to tell them my father had died: because who else did I know who had known him? Or would care?

The horror and cruelty of dying in his most hated element. The problem essentially is that I despise boats.

catching my hand and pressing it to her face. “Like old times.”

Its curious how differently they remember the same events from the past. Theo felt unwanted by them and specifically her, so its interesting that it seems like she misses him.

Whenever she smiled at me Heaven blew in.

Okay bisexual diva

you needed some fairly compelling reason to keep moving forward into darkness, rather than falling straight back into the gorgeous feather mattress you’d so foolishly abandoned.

Is this not the human experience

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.

It must be a bit of a conflict of conscience for him to feel similar to his dad since his dad has been the primary antagonist in his life

pressing her palm to my face, remembering how lucky I was.

I cant help but feel a bit of an emptiness in this relationship. I dont believe it completely. I waant him to long to be with Boris!!!!!

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. I was seeing things that weren’t there.

Don’t forget those,” I said, nodding at the earrings, which were still lying on the tablecloth. “Oh! No! Of course not!” she said guiltily, grabbing them up and throwing them into her bag like a handful of loose change.

SHE IS NOT RIGHT FOR HIM! no hate, she just isnt compatible w him. Its a completely different lifestyle

“Potter!”

YEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSUH

Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

“I don’t expect you to understand but it’s rough to be in love with the wrong person.”

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;

and I thought, not for the first time, how there’d been no freedom for Platt in his refusal to grow up, how by slacking off too long he’d managed to destroy every last glimmer of his hereditary privilege;

Chance plays tricks, my dad had liked to say. Systems, spread breakdowns.

it’s never the way it seems—all good, all bad. So much easier if it was. Even your dad… feeding me, talking with me, spending time, sheltering me in his roof, giving me clothes off his back… you hated your dad so much but in some ways he was good man.”

And I know how you think, or how you like to think, but maybe this is one instance where you can’t boil down to pure ‘good’ or pure ‘bad’ like you always want to do—? Like, your two different piles? Bad over here, good over here? Maybe not quite so simple.

We looked at each other. And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I’d liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I’d met him was that he was never afraid. You didn’t meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call “the Planet of Earth.”

Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?

“but Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”

Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?”

disembark—and I think of what Hobie said: 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.

Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?

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 p...

It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand.

Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am.

Yet even a child can see its dignity: thimble of bravery, all fluff and brittle bone. Not timid, not even hopeless, but steady and holding its place. Refusing to pull back from the world. And, increasingly, I find myself fixing on that refusal to pull back. Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe.

and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no “do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death.

And—maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?

And as terrible as this is, I get it. We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are.

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

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.