The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats.

Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong.

I hope that things are going okay wonderful for you

“Um, we don’t hit women in America.” He scowled, and spit out an apple seed. “No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them.”

“How should I know what the fuck?” “Then why do you argue with me? Why do you think you always know better? 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.

Fifth Avenue side, looking in, and the paths were tree-shadowed, haloed with streetlamps, mysterious and inviting like the woods from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Live by the sword, die by the sword,

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 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.

:)