The Last Days of Night

by Graham Moore

The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory. Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation.

It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable.

All men get the things they love. The tragedy of some men is not that they are denied, but that they wish they’d loved something else.

It seemed to Paul that the people who did not care about money came in one of two varieties. The first were the blithely wealthy. Born to privilege, they had been so rich for so long that the question of money had honestly never occurred to them. They might be aware of their good luck, but the concept was purely theoretical. They knew in the abstract that they had things that others didn’t, but—or perhaps because of this—they seemed always to be conjuring up purely hypothetical desires that remained abstractly unfulfilled. They imagined other people far richer, and took great care to delineate their differences from such genuine excess. If only one could make the trip to Europe every year, they might say, like the So-and-So’s. That sort of thing. Then they weighted themselves with their humdrum family dramas, with the tragic intrigue of wastrel brothers and unmarried sisters. The daily slights and indignities of familial melodrama allowed them the freedom to imagine themselves burdened. Such people could afford to choose for themselves what to be miserable about. The second variety was, ironically, the unknowing poor. They hadn’t a dime, they’d never had a dime, they weren’t likely to have a dime, and while they liked the notion of dimes in principle, they had no idea quite how much pleasure a dime could purchase. They were not happily poor—that would be a condescending caricature. Being poor did not make anyone happy. It was only that some people managed to be both.