Trust

by Hernan Diaz

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.

New York swelled with the loud optimism of those who believe they have outpaced the future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. The future happens. The Lord casts no one into hell; the spirits cast themselves down, according to Swedenborg. The spirits cast themselves into hell by their own free choice. And what is choice but a branch of the future grafting itself onto the stem of the present?

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.

Denial is always a form of confirmation.

This experience taught him two lessons he took to heart. The first one was that the ideal conditions for business were never given. One had to create them. If the embargo had initially shattered his dreams, he found a way to turn the situation to his favor. And his second and main discovery was that self-interest, if properly directed, need not be divorced from the common good, as all the transactions he conducted throughout his life eloquently show. These two principles (we make our own weather; personal gain ought to be a public asset) I have always striven to follow.

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.

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.

Even his failures were evidence of his heroic spirit. They proved that the world had wronged him—and his mere presence was a testimony to his resilience.

While grateful for it, he was suspicious of the American notion of freedom, which he viewed as a strict synonym of conformism or, even worse, the mere possibility of choosing between different versions of the same product. Needless to say, he objected to consumerism and the alienation fueling it—in a perverse circle, workers kept dehumanizing jobs in order to both produce superfluous goods and purchase them.

The Voynich manuscript is a fifteenth-century volume on parchment kept at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale University. Little is known about what seems to be, from the illustrations, a treatise on unidentified plant species and cosmology. The manuscript could be from anywhere in Central Europe, and it is written in a made-up alphabet that has baffled generations of scholars. Despite considerable investments of time and resources, linguists, cryptographers and even government agencies all over the world have, as yet, failed to decipher it.

My father was right: money was a divine essence that could embody itself in any concrete manifestation.

My father exerted an emotional monopoly.

“She would have liked you. Sycophants bored her.” In plain contradiction with the spirit of Bevel’s last sentence, I felt immensely proud and flattered by it.

And as time went by and he saw how hard I applied myself to it, his respect for me grew. “Work” was the standard by which he measured a person’s worth, and I think he finally had come to see me as a “worker,” the highest honor he could bestow on anyone—all the people he admired, dead or living, were “true workers.”

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. He could relate to this: as he fed one piece of type into the composing stick, he was spotting the nick and face of the next one. “Now” did not seem to exist. He also told me the biggest influence of his work in his life had been that it had taught him to see the world backward. This was the main thing typesetters and revolutionaries had in common: they knew the matrix of the world was reversed, and even if reality was inverted, they could make sense of it at first glance.

“A nation’s prosperity is based on nothing but a multitude of egoisms aligning until they resemble what is known as the common good. Get enough selfish individuals to converge and act in the same direction, and the result looks very much like a collective will or a common cause. But once this illusory public interest is at work, people forget an all-important distinction: that my needs, desires and cravings may mirror yours does not mean we have a shared goal. It merely means we have the same goal. This is a crucial difference. I will only cooperate with you as long as it serves me. Beyond that, there can only be rivalry or indifference.”

Cooperation, when its objective is personal gain, should never be confused with solidarity.

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? And does “hurt” refer to the inflicting or the suffering?

Kitsch. Can’t think of Engl. trans. for this word. A copy that’s so proud of how close it comes to the original that it believes there’s more worth in this closeness than in originality itself. “It looks just like . . . !” Imposture of feeling over actual emotion; sentimentality over sentiment. Kitsch can also be in the eye: “The sunset looks like a painting!” Because artifice is now the ultimate standard, the original (sunset) has to be turned into a fake (painting), so that the latter may provide the measure of the former’s beauty. Kitsch is always a form of inverted Platonism, prizing imitation over archetype. And in every case, it’s related to an inflation of aesthetic value, as seen in the worst kind of kitsch: “classy” kitsch. Solemn, ornamental, grand. Ostentatiously, arrogantly announcing its divorce from authenticity.

As always, he mistakes doubt with depth, hesitation with analysis.

This courteous estrangement would, from now on, be our life, I thought. But then a blanket of exhaustion descended on me. The oddest thing: it smothered me under its weight while also providing me with a bizarre sense of comfort.

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

Short selling is folding back time. The past making itself present in the future.

La fauve agonie des feuilles