Donna Tartt: The Goldfinch

[Do you ever think about quitting? I asked, during the boring part of It’s a Wonderful Life, the moonlight walk with Donna Reed, when I was in Antwerp watching Boris with spoon and water from an eyedropper, mixing himself what he called a “pop.”

Give me a break! My arm hurts! He’d already shown me the bloody skid mark—black at the edges—cutting deep into his bicep. You get shot at Christmas and see if you want to sit around swallowing aspirin!

Yeah, but you’re crazy to do it like that.

Well—believe it or not—for me not so much a problem. I only do it special occasions.

I’ve heard that before.

Well, is true! Still a chipper, for now. I’ve known of people chipped three-four years and been ok, long as they kept it down to two-three times a month? That said, Boris added somberly—blue movie light glinting off the teaspoon—I am alcoholic. Damage is done, there. I’m a drunk till I die. If anything kills me—nodding at the Russian Standard bottle on the coffee table—that’ll be it. Say you never shot before?

Believe me, I had problems enough the other way.

Well, big stigma and fear, I understand. Me—honest, I prefer to sniff most times—clubs, restaurants, out and about, quicker and easier just to duck in men’s room and do a quick bump. This way—always you crave it. On my death bed I will crave it. Better never to pick it up. Although—really very irritating to see some bone head sitting there smoking out of a crack pipe and make some pronouncement about how dirty and unsafe, they would never use a needle, you know? Like they are so much more sensible than you?

Why did you start?

Why does anyone? My girl left me! Girl at the time. Wanted to be all bad and self-destructive, hah. Got my wish.

Jimmy Stewart in his varsity sweater. Silvery moon, quavery voices. Buffalo Gals won’t you come out tonight, come out tonight.

So, why not stop then? I said.

Why should I?

Do I really have to say why?

Yeah, but what if I don’t feel like it?

If you can stop, why wouldn’t you?

Live by the sword, die by the sword, said Boris briskly, hitting the button on his very professional-looking medical tourniquet with his chin as he was pushing up his sleeve.]

And as terrible as this is, I get it. We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are. (One thing I’ll have to say for my dad: at least he tried to want the sensible thing—my mother, the briefcase, me—before he completely went berserk and ran away from it.)

And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

And—I would argue as well—all love. Or, perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying. Pippa herself is the play between those things, both love and not-love, there and not-there. Photographs on the wall, a balled-up sock under the sofa. The moment where I reached to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and she laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

And that’s why I’ve chosen to write these pages as I’ve written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all.

Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.