View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
People would sometimes speak of Perelman as a cruel nutcase, willing to deprive his mother, now an almost elderly woman, of a million dollars. Olga, on the other hand, wonders what that woman, Lubov, was like [...] there's nothing about her that suggests a helpless woman. It seems likely to Olga that her way of being might scarcely be different from Perelman's, or that the need to believe in an honest and transparent place might be one of Madame Lubov's qualities, which she passed on to her son. Why attribute to him the desire for a million dollars that would change his life and, in addition, force him to shoulder the fate of strangers, lives attached to each one of those dollar bills?
[...] We realized, his mother would say, that they were watching him learn. Human beings have that ability to turn almost any aspect of life into a peerless diamond, darkened lampposts in the park that, when lighted, alter the mood of a dream. [...]
[...] after a while all that he's been will have completely dissolved, not even tears in the rain will remain but, rather that invisible ocean of each and every person who has lived and those about whom nothing is known, even if someone discovers a lost photograph or a postcard in a flea market. You'll say it will be different this time: you'll store their data, their emails, their browser history, links to images and texts they left on the web. But in a hundred years there will be more than a billion dead people, and it doesn't look like anyone will be searching for them on the web.
a related thing i think about a lot: you can store this stuff for eternity in a way that is permanent and independent of capricious fickle emotion human meaning. but it only means anything when filtered through the messy human shit
[...] As for lamps, people carry them inside themselves. Many people in his environment are quite familiar with what it means to close one's eyes, even when they're open, and gaze on an invisible, inner darkness. They have extensive experience doing other impossible things, like waiting for someone they know won't come, like dwelling in that afternoon when they left their house and entered someone else's and the two of them loved a lot. If you could see how naturally they trusted one another, even when time says: We're an instant, what we live never returns, nostalgia is nothing but a refuge.
dont totally know what she's talking about here but this is quite pretty
[...] You may be thinking that you don't even need to bring him to your central offices. Any old job in Madrid will do. It wouldn't take more than six months before Mateo began to convince himself that he got the job because of his qualities and began to believe in merit and began to forget about desperation.
A skill is something you know how to do. Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
There's luck in art. And there's the gift. You can't earn that. But you can learn skill, you can earn it. You can learn to deserve your gift.
Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.
[...] she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
The most obvious indicator of financialisation is the dramatic increase in the size of the finance sector itself. Between 1970 and 2007, the UK’s finance sector grew 1.5% faster than the economy as a whole each year.9 The profits of financial corporations show an even starker trend: between 1948 and 1989, financial intermediation accounted for around 1.5% of total economy profits. This figure had risen to 15% by 2007.10 The share of finance in economic output was, however, dwarfed by the growth in the assets held by the UK banking system: banks’ assets grew fivefold between 1990 and 2007, reaching almost 500% of GDP by 2007.11 The UK also boasted one of the biggest shadow banking systems relative to its GDP before the crisis — a trend that has continued to this day.12 Meanwhile, cottage industries of financial lawyers, consultants, and assorted advisors grew up in the glistening towers in the City of London and Canary Wharf. Between 1997 and 2010, the increase in the share of financial and insurance services in UK value-added was greater than the increase in the share of any other broad sector bar the government sector — itself supported by the tax revenues provided by finance.13 Overall, by 2007, the UK had one of the largest finance sectors in the world relative to the real economy.
Historically, its advocates have argued that capitalism makes everyone better off by creating wealth for everyone. Businesses make profits, and they invest these profits in future production. This creates jobs, which raise living standards for the majority of the population. Such a system might lead to rising inequality in the short term but, as entrepreneurs reinvest their profits, eventually this wealth will trickle down to everyone else. Whilst this has always been an optimistic reading of the way capitalism works, during the post-war period it often appeared to reflect reality (at least in the global North). But finance-led growth upsets the channels through which wealth is supposed to trickle down from rich to poor, and it does so in obvious ways. Investment slows, wages fall, and profits — especially financial profits — boom.