Trust

by Hernan Diaz

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 was, everyone agreed, a peerless anecdotalist and a consummate matchmaker.

passeggiata

a remote land ruled by occult conspiracies, mystic hierarchies, and labyrinthine laws.

Knowing that powerlessness has a way of turning into rancor—just as someone who undervalues himself eventually will blame others for his depreciation—she

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.

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.

Telephone lines had yet to reach the Institute, radio signals were too weak in that deep valley surrounded by tall mountains, and the relay system he had designed to transmit information from New York and London to Bad Pfäfers was much too slow. The developments of the market reached him only as “news,” which is how the press refers to decisions made by other people in the recent past.

I am a financier in a city ruled by financiers. My father was a financier in a city ruled by industrialists. His father was a financier in a city ruled by merchants. His father was a financier in a city ruled by a tight-knit society, indolent and priggish, like most provincial aristocracies. These four cities are one and the same, New York.

Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt. We spend the years between these episodes benefiting or suffering from their consequences until the arrival of the next forceful moment. A man’s worth is established by the number of these defining circumstances he is able to create for himself. He need not always be successful, for there can be great honor in defeat. But he ought to be the main actor in the decisive scenes in his existence, whether they be epic or tragic.

He was marooned on his dim, rancorous islet, caught between the country he had left and resented and the land that had taken him in without fully accepting him.

My father never called himself an immigrant. He was an exile. This was an all-important distinction for him. He had not chosen to leave; he had been chased out.

“Fiction harmless? Look at religion. Fiction harmless? Look at the oppressed masses content with their lot because they have embraced the lies imposed on them. History itself is just a fiction—a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget.

This single photo has colonized the few memories I have of her.

After my mother’s death I found this new role, which I performed inexpertly and in an improvised fashion, natural. I had become the woman in the house. My father, the anarchist, found the fact that child labor was required to keep the gender status quo intact equally natural.

“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 I experienced at that moment remains, to this day, the standard by which I measure hatred.

It’s only through a great effort that I can convince myself that I’m here today.

Sometimes a middling artist; more often, painfully fervent dilettantes.

Quasimodo, deafened by bells, loves ringing them.

In books, music, art I’ve always looked for emotion + elegance.