Trust

by Hernan Diaz

Those who accused him of being excessively frugal failed to understand that, in truth, he had no appetites to repress.

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.

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.

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.

In the past, she had thought this space within herself to be as vast and serenely inexplicable as a cosmos. Now she deemed it narrow and flat.

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

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.

while that young person had believed he would renounce everything in favor of his calling, this aging man was sure he had given life a fair try.

I am a financier in a city ruled by financiers.

Today’s gentleman is yesterday’s upstart.

These two principles (we make our own weather; personal gain ought to be a public asset) I have always striven to follow.

no investment pays higher dividends than education.

It is hard work to give money away.

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.

“The business of America is business.”

They say the education of a child begins several generations before it is born.

Everyone was playing finance with toy money.

I have always been a guardian of public interest, even when it may seem that my actions go against the public interest.

After staring at the façade for a while, I realize it is not the building I am looking at but my memories that, like tracing paper, cover it.

Ever since his death I have inexplicably felt that those misspellings bring us closer to each other. That we meet in them.

Strange it seemed to them that they should be there because of what dead men had written in old books.”

Man had become the machine’s machine. He would fight back.

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.

Stocks, shares and all that garbage are just claims to future value. So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That’s what all those criminals trade in: fictions.”

I closed with a reflection on time and how it was up to each one of us to carve our present out of the shapeless block of the future—or something to that effect.

Even roses are for funerals. Uneven roses are for love.”

For the first time since meeting Andrew Bevel, it occurred to me that I should be afraid.

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.

“There is a better world,” a man said. “But it’s more expensive.”

it was this strange paradox of being in private in public that felt so opulent—

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.”

His was such a confident chaos.

“The orchestra played Puccini and the sort of music that you always know what’s going to come next, that you can listen to ahead, as it were.”

Music that one almost doesn’t need to listen to, because its development is all implied by the form.

It’s not that I’m tired of him. I’m tired of the person I become around him.

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.

The leap from percussion to melody took music out of prehistory into its history.

Calling her a friend would be an insult to the dignity of her impersonal care. And yet.

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

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