Trust

by Hernan Diaz

He moved back from New England to the city and failed where most of his acquaintances thrived—he was an inept athlete, an apathetic clubman, an unenthusiastic drinker, an indifferent gambler, a lukewarm lover.

In the end, he became a wealthy man playing the part of a wealthy man. That his circumstances coincided with his costume did not make him feel any better.

However paradoxical, this desire to confirm the distance separating him from others was a form of communion with them. And he was new to this feeling.

The Brevoorts were an old Albany family whose fortune had not kept up with their name.

faintly filthy fabrications.

Icy spores of anxiety colonized her mind and reduced it to a wasteland of fear.

Sleeplessness kept claiming her nights, and she used books as shields against the onslaught of her abstract terrors.

She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.

There was a calm confidence to the silence, as if it knew it would always prevail with little effort.

She was particularly interested in living authors, although she initially refused to meet them, knowing the distance between the work and the person could be covered only by disappointment.

They organized private recitals at their home, and on these occasions, they could be together, in silence, sharing emotions for which they were not responsible and which did not refer directly to the two of them. Precisely because they were so controlled and mediated, these were Benjamin and Helen’s most intimate moments.

He saw, in short, that the relationship with the consumer did not end with the purchase of a good; there was more profit to be extracted from that exchange.

He wove intricate conjectures around her, threaded with contrived causal links that quickly expanded into vast nets of suppositions, which he would unspin and weave again in different patterns.

Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail—we are ruined by forces beyond our control.

As the city sank into the depression that followed the crash, Helen found it harder to leave the house. She knew that looking away from the destitute families, the breadlines, the shuttered stores, and the despair in every thinning face was a gross form of self-indulgence, but she also understood that the anguish she felt when confronted by this bleak reality was yet another of her luxuries. Helen had to acknowledge this paradox each time she went for a walk—until

What mattered was that she was unable to stop thinking about her thoughts. Her speculations reflected one another, like parallel mirrors—and, endlessly, each image inside the vertiginous tunnel looked at the next wondering whether it was the original or a reproduction. This, she told herself, was the beginning of madness.

The mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth.

And for a moment, there was no struggle and all was at rest, because time seemed to have arrived at its destination.

The future irrupts at all times, wanting to actualize itself in every decision we make; it tries, as hard as it can, to become the past.

As the sun rose, however, her monologue declined into sporadic mutterings, which, in turn, melted into silence. For an hour or so, she would enjoy the bliss of impersonality—of becoming pure perception, of existing only as that which saw the mountaintop, heard the bell, smelled the air.

He possessed all the qualities commonly attached to men of intellectual genius. He was absentminded, withdrawn and focused on his work to the detriment of the most basic everyday tasks, at which he was charmingly inept.

Whatever the past may have handed on to us, it is up to each one of us to chisel our present out of the shapeless block of the future.

This is why his rigid and often misinformed opinions became irrefutable dogmas, especially when reason and common sense, in unison, contested them.

Sounds had a tactile quality, and we all did our best not to litter the space with any audible objects of our own.

the closer one is to a source of power, the quieter it gets. Authority and money surround themselves with silence, and one can measure the reach of someone’s influence by the thickness of the hush enveloping them.

(returning to a meaningful place after several decades reveals how alien one can be to oneself).

Walking around Wall Street during the weekend, one gets the impression that the world’s affairs have been settled once and for all, that the age of work is finally over and that humanity has moved on to its next stage.

I told him, for instance, how I had come to experience time differently. The word I was typing was always in the past while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited.

The word I was typing was always in the past while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited.

More than the mahogany panels, the cut-glass decanters, the embroidered upholstery and the capped, white-gloved driver on the other side of the partition, it was this strange paradox of being in private in public that felt so opulent—a feeling that was one with the illusion of suddenly having become untouchable and invulnerable, with the fantasy of being in total control of myself, of others and of the city as a whole.

Just as Rhys says in her passage, “you always know what’s going to come next.” This music creates an unavoidable future for itself. It has no free will. There’s only fulfilment. It’s fatal music. Just like the chime I hear every day. D F♯ E A plants + grows the seed of A E F♯ D in the mind before the ear can hear it.

Hemicrania

A diarist is a monster: the writing hand and the reading eye are sourced from different bodies.

God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.

Each particle of light has travelled from the sun to my feet. How can something so small have made it so far? Up close, the stream of photons would look like a meteor shower. My feet play with it. The vertigo of scale (the space between a photon and me and a star) is a foretaste of death.

All intervals in the song are flipped, turned upside down. A major third up (D F♯) becomes a major third down (D B♭), a step down (F♯ E) a step up (B♭ C), a fall of a fifth (E A) a proportional upward jump (C G). D F♯ E A becomes D B♭ C G. But backwards. The inversion of the retrograde. A song played in reverse and on its head. Call and response. “The orchestra played the kind of music where you know what’s coming next, where you can listen ahead.” In 1929, everyone heard D F♯ E A and, listening ahead, thought A E F♯ D. But when I heard D F♯ E A, the response ringing in my mind was G C B♭ D.

“Imagine the relief of finding out that one is not the one one thought one was”