The Secret History

“I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive .”

The heroes of old are immortalized in the stars. They are the chosen ones the Greek pantheon looked upon with grace and said, “You. You are special. You deserve to be praised. You deserve to belong.” 

And the heroes preen under the praise of the Gods and said, “Yes, please. Make me feel powerful; put me on a pedestal.” Because, even with all the admiration and recognition they receive from the gods, they are still human. And to be human is to aspire to something more; to obsess over the idea of greatness.

To not only live, but “To live forever.” 

So when the Gods suspended their souls in the heavens forever, I suppose it’s only right for us mortals to look up at all of them and think “That’s beautiful.”

And that, to me, is what the book The Secret History is. A small pocket of beauty for me to marvel at. Something to feed my delusions of grandeur and aspirations. 

But, the stories immortalized in the stars are far from perfect.   

For example: Andromeda. She is forever chained to her prison in the sky; doomed to a fate of torture by her vain mother, Cassiopeia. Even if she can see Perseus forever drawing nearer and nearer to come to her rescue, he will never reach her.   

If we’re meant to live forever, then why is Henry Winter dead by his own hand?

The illusion of the perfection and beauty of everything is so easily shattered. Our beliefs are such fickle things after all. If you think about it, the sky is just a vast chasm of black matter and the unknown, most of the stories we hear of Greek heroes end in tragedy, and the cast of characters I so adore in The Secret History are horrifying people in reality. 

The more layers you peel back on the universe, the more disheartening information you discover, and it's easy to fall down a rabbit hole of despair and disdain for life.

Apathy: noun, a lack of feeling or emotion or interest or concern. It’s my obsession–vast, chaotic, consuming–that I believe I learned from The Secret History.

The protagonist of the book, Richard Papen, is trapped in a miserable and monotonous life. But when a charismatic classics professor encourages him to leave his old life behind and join him and his group of five, seemingly perfect, students in their study of ancient Greek; Richard thinks he may have just been given the answer to all his problems.

Because, you see, this group of students have been Richard’s obsession for months on end. He finds himself envious of their poise, their status, their exclusivity. To him, they may as well have been the heroes from the old myths they studied come to life and in the flesh, all for him to marvel at. They were special, they deserved praise, they belonged, and soon, he hoped he would too. 

But, by the end of the book, two of Richard’s friends are dead, one is missing completely, and the two who remain both feel as if they would be better off dead. Richard is back right where he started, feeling constantly drowned by apathy and hatred for his life. He, too, peeled back the many layers of beauty shrouded over his life and became both disillusioned with and horribly obsessed with the truth he discovered lying underneath. I don’t think my unhealthy obsession with the book leaves me any better off, however. 

But, oddly enough, hidden deep in the all-consuming, addictive black hole of entropy are strange moments of beauty. 

Henry said that “Death is the mother of beauty,” and sometimes I think he’s right.   

For example,  Francis’ suicide note to Richard is, arguably, some of the most gorgeous writing in the whole book. “Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones I did not,” has always been a line that stuck firmly in my mind.

Even Francis and Richard’s relationship is a thing of beauty that managed to bloom amongst so much death. Much like two Greek heroes that they devoted their lives to studying, Achilles and Patroclus, they found solace and companionship in one another. They weathered the storm of Troy hand in hand; Francis and Richard weathered the storm of their time at Hampton College hand in hand.

The Fates knotted the strings of their souls together, binding them in life, or even in death.       

The Goldfinch

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”

Theo and Boris were soldiers. 

They fought a war of neglect, addiction, absent fathers, dead mothers. A war made out of memories. Two on everyone else.

If you were to carve out my heart and take a look at the place where all the friends I have ever held dear to me rests, I’m almost confident you will find us running through empty streets by the light of streetlamps, sharing cigarettes in an empty park, and laying on the floor in front of a muted TV with a dry summer wind blowing in through open windows. Because that’s how Theo and Boris spent their days together.

Needless to say, their relationship means a lot to me. 

The entire middle-section of The Goldfinch is a wonderful exploration of the blurry line between platonic and romantic love. The degree to which Boris and Theo care for each other, to some people, lends itself more to a romantic connection than platonic. While, to be honest, I am rather fond of that interpretation of their relationship, I can't help but wonder why people refuse to give platonic love the same weight they do romantic? Is it not possible for two friends to be just as bonded and important to each other as two people in a romantic relationship? The Goldfinch really goes out of its way to challenge that question. 

I think that it's the sheer scope of Boris and Theo’s relationship that makes their separation all the more painful.

By both uncontrollable circumstances and by choices, a whole country is placed between them, and any semblance of a relationship they once had is severed. Theo runs away from Vegas and he’s finally back in New York just as he always wanted; however, he had to leave a piece of himself behind. 

Yet, here I am perched right in between their two worlds sitting on the railing of my balcony, which is almost exactly in between New York and Las Vegas. I may be in Chicago, yet my thoughts feel miles away. The air was cold and made me shiver, nothing like the desolate, oppressive gusts of the Las Vegas desert, nor the drained swimming pool Theo and Boris were sitting in, but the energy around me was just about the same. Two friends sitting together sharing an easy conversation together under a big, starry sky. Well, three of us, in my case.

  I flipped my head backward to glance at my two friends sitting behind me, both of them upside down due to my position lying on top of the balcony. My head spun and my vision swam while I struggled to smirk at the two of them. 

There’s a word Theo brings up early on in the book: consanguinity. He said it made him think of blood brothers. While I’m pretty sure he defined it wrong, I can understand why he liked his definition better.

“Get off of there, you’re gonna die.”

I felt a pair of hands grab my arms, loosely hanging down by my face, and pull hard. I tumbled onto the burnt orange, fake, plastic wood that my deck was made of; eyes facing towards the sky and happier than I had felt in a long time regardless of the pain beginning to bloom at the back of my head. I lay there limply.

“Great job, I think you killed him.”

“Well, it was either he fell four stories off the roof or a few feet down this way!”

What Boris and Theo had cannot be described as a friendship; it was so much bigger than that. Bigger than the suburb they were trapped in, bigger than the whole of the desolate, dead, Las Vegas desert, even bigger than the 2,230.61 miles between Las Vegas and New York City that will separate them. They transcend the shallow bond of friendship; they were something intangible to anyone else besides them, something the universe deemed inevitable. They were joined in blood, and I finally understood why that bond was so valuable.

“I love you two,” I said to Orian’s belt. 

The city is never quiet; the constant buzz of car horns and pedestrians and police sirens constantly assaults your senses, but I think that’s the closest I’ve ever heard to dead silence. 

The wind blew my bangs back from my face and made me shiver again. Orian dipped behind a big puffy cloud, leaving me to stare at Vega and the faint outline of Altair. I think if there were ever a time for them to embrace one another again, I would want it to be right now. My blood thrummed hard in my veins, and my heart pulsed loud in my ears.

A cool pair of hands were placed against my flaming cheeks and a foot gently nudged at the crown of my head. 

“I love you, too.”

“Y’all are the best, I swear.”

Consanguinity: noun, relationship by blood; kinship.

Or, to two kids on the outskirts of Las Vegas and three teenagers in the heart of Chicago: A bond stronger than life; blood brothers.           

No Longer Human

“I shall be nothing. The wind, the sky.”

  Antonyms are fascinating to me. The only subjective word-paring ideas in my opinion. 

What is the antonym to light? Dark is the first one that comes to mind. The antonym to black? White is the most obvious. The antonym to white? Let's look at the options:

Black could be an option. Representing evil, and corruption, and death, and fear, yet it offers a nice contrast to the good, purity, calm, and peace of white. But what about red? Red could represent power, or sin, or anger, or war. Are those not also in opposition of the ideas of white?

Things are never as white and red as they seem to be. 

Take the book No Longer Human for example. On the one hand, the protagonist, Oba Yozo, is incredibly sexist towards all of the (few, which is its own problem) female characters and generally makes some questionable and poor choices. But he is also very clearly battling mental illness while living in a time when it was not well understood, which is no easy feat. Yozo exists as both negative and positive attributes; the gray space between the two.

When looking at the context the book was written, I think that Yozo’s characterization was very purposeful. The author of No Longer Human, Dazai Osamu, wrote it as what can only be described as a thinly-veiled autobiography. Dazai used his skill as an author to express his feelings of alienation from society, struggles with morality, and grapplings with suicide throughout his book. Learning that absolutely terrified me.

You see, I found this book to be a horrifically raw, yet truthful exploration of what constant apathy and depression feels like on a day to day basis throughout the course of a life. As the book went on, I felt myself becoming more sympathetic and understanding of Yozo.  

He expresses a sickly addictive desire to simply just let everything pass. A desire that he should fly under the radar of society and exist as nothing but a cool breeze, or the vast unknown of the sky. He embraces the uselessness of life, allows it to consume his every waking thought, and encourages all the lethargy of depression to rush in on him and consume him like “the sea off the coast of Kamakura.”

Let everything pass.

“Everything passes” 

While Dazai Osamu may have lost his own battle with depression in 1948, Yozo never did, regardless of his numerous attempts. While I am well aware that this fact should be comforting to me, it’s not. No longer Human ends in ambiguous tragedy, which, frankly, seems like the only plausible conclusion to a character so enamored with the worthlessness of life and his own self-destructive habits. But I wonder, is the only possible ending for those who toe the line between apathy and the vast unknown, tragedy?

Nihilism: noun, “a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless.” 

Friedrich Nietzsche said ​​the thought of suicide was “A great consolation by means of it gets one through many a dark night.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky said suicide was “Such a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.”

Dazai Osamu didn’t have to say anything, only act.       

If all of these philosophers think that nihilism necessitates tragedy, does that make it true? Because I don’t want it to be.

Yes, the corruption and apathy of life can be addicting and, oftentimes, seem inevitable, but it's a dangerous way to move through the world. We spend so long lost in the inky black nothingness of the sky that we miss the glorious Argo Navis making its noble journey, all in hopes that Jason and the Argonauts may find the Golden Fleece. 

We fail to see the intricacies of our existence and pay homage to the gray space in which we all operate. 

We deprive each other of the connection and comradery that can act as the North Star and guide us from the darkness of tragedy into the light of acceptance.   

And most importantly, to be human is to obsess over the idea of life itself. Because, as someone I was obsessed with once said: “Death is the mother of beauty.”