Trust

by Hernan Diaz

Time became a constant itch.

Still, as he reached and passed what he thought was the midpoint of his life, a dim sense of genealogical responsibility, together with an even vaguer notion of propriety, made him consider marriage.

Icy spores of anxiety colonized her mind and reduced it to a wasteland of fear. Her blood, thinned, seemed to course too fast through her veins. Sometimes she thought she could feel her heart gasping.

That she never shed this persona made her wonder, later in life, if that was not who she had truly been all along or if, rather, over the years, her spirit had shaped itself after the mask.

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.

More than the threatening tone, what she found terrifying was the incoherence of his tirade, because she thought there was no greater violence than the one done to meaning.

She cared about the administrative, financial, and diplomatic intricacies that kept society going as much as she was concerned about the engine under the hood of a motorcar or the fire room below a steamer’s deck. “Things” should simply “work.”

Me

These were all common-enough objects, but they were the real things, the originals after which the flawed copies that littered the world had been made.

Intimacy can be an unbearable burden for those who, first experiencing it after a lifetime of proud self-sufficiency, suddenly realize it makes their world complete. Finding bliss becomes one with the fear of losing it. They doubt their right to hold someone else accountable for their happiness; they worry that their loved one may find their reverence tedious; they fear their yearning may have distorted their features in ways they cannot see. Thus, as the weight of all these questions and concerns bends them inward, their newfound joy in companionship turns into a deeper expression of the solitude they thought they had left behind.

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.

The fears clawing at her mind in the dark were no longer abstract and incoherent. And they were not erased by sunlight.

She could feel herself think differently and knew that, in the end, it did not matter whether this feeling was based on reality or fantasies. 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.

giddy with the drama of it all and visibly pleased to be agitated and slightly out of breath.

He had always feared he would lose Helen—lose her interest, lose her to someone else. And now it had happened. She was gone, having abandoned him for something that called to her with irresistible vehemence. He discovered that he was jealous of the illness, which demanded and got all her attention and energy—and he was ashamed to admit that he was angry at Helen for doing everything her dark master commanded.

Only a fool would distinguish past from present in such a way. 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. This is what distinguishes the future from mere fancy.

“news,” which is how the press refers to decisions made by other people in the recent past.

She could not stop talking because she could not stop trying to explain her illness—and her desire to understand her illness was, to a large extent, the illness itself.

Her face was a desolate ruin. A thing broken and abandoned, exhausted of being.

He looked back up, offended, at the misplaced moon.

in some occasions numbers and statistics have no meaning: each loss is absolute and can never be mitigated by past or future triumphs.

During this time, Mrs. Brevoort was exuberant in her grief, exploring all the social possibilities of mourning. She found unsuspected radiance in the deepest shades of black and made sure to surround herself with particularly plaintive and misty-eyed friends so that she could highlight her arrogant form of sorrow, which she called “dignified.” It is not unlikely that she felt genuine pain under the somewhat farcical spectacle of bereavement she put up for her circle. Some people, under certain circumstances, hide their true emotions under exaggeration and hyperbole, not realizing their amplified caricature reveals the exact measure of the feelings it was meant to conceal.

Convulsive therapy laid the ground for what, a few years later, would become electroshock therapy.

My name is known to many, my deeds to some, my life to few. This has never concerned me much.

I offer here my wife’s loving portrait, resigned to knowing it shall fail to fully honor her dignity, candor and grace.

I know the days ahead of me are fewer than those I have left behind. There is no escaping this most basic fact of accounting. A certain amount of time is allotted to each of us. How much, only God knows. We cannot invest it. We cannot hope for a return of any kind. All we can do is spend it, second by second, decade by decade, until it runs out.

If she was unable to get better, she would make the world better.

Generosity is the mother of ingratitude.

My methodical approach reined in her understandable passion.

“Federal Open Market Committee.” Joke! We either have an “Open Market” or we have a “Federal Committee.” But we cannot have the former fenced in by the latter!

Stern, clean lines coursed up the limestone panels only to be interrupted by copper cornices with overly ornate tracery, gothic arches and busts of futuristic-looking gladiators. Greedily, comically, the building claimed all of history for itself—not just the past but also the world to come.

My father disapproved. Secretary was a demeaning occupation, he said. It promised independence but was another knot in the millenary subjection of women to the rule of men.

an amalgamation of resentment and longing, of gratitude and antipathy.

History itself is just a fiction—a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget.

The entire meaning of the book in one short sentence.

I think my desire for being smitten was stronger than my desire for him.

Her approach to the world was elementary and, without fail, right.

“How did we get here? How? All we have left to choose is different forms of terror. Terror and imperialism. That’s all. Fascist imperialism. Soviet imperialism. Capitalist imperialism. Those are our only choices now, it seems. The time has come for radical action.”

What all tendencies, branches and splinters of anarchism—and there are quite a few—have in common is their opposition to every form of hierarchy and inequality. It should not be surprising, then, that there are no extensive records of the movement, since the institutional order required to keep such records was in obvious contradiction with the movement’s tenets.

“There’s nothing heroic about defending other people’s interests just because they happen to coincide with yours. Cooperation, when its objective is personal gain, should never be confused with solidarity.

His body seemed to be an infelicitous but tolerable accident to him. I could not imagine him wanting anyone to touch it.

His was such a confident chaos. Over time and through a mysterious transmutation I had derived a sense of safety from all that was erratic and unstable in our life together.

The place looked frightening. Dangerously and irreversibly filthy. It smelled of madness. But all this only deepened the love I felt for him right then. A love so tightly intermingled with pity that from that day on I was unable to tell one apart from the other.

I try, and sometimes succeed, to become a thing.

Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one. But who? Who is “I” in “I hurt”? The one who inflicts the pain or the one who suffers it?

Silence between 2 is always shared. But 1 of the 2 owns it and shares it with the other.

For I’ve come to think one is truly married only when one is more committed to one’s vows than the person they refer to.

Sleepless. Never fail to find an exasperating sound, an awkward memory, a sore spot, a grievance.

Me nightly.

I distrust the surge of well-being within me when I make him feel good.

“The orchestra played the kind of music where you know what’s coming next, where you can listen ahead.”

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

The terrifying freedom of knowing that nothing, from now on, will become a memory