SUMMER READING
Hoffmann stared at the tablecloth and let the discussion flow around him. He was remembering now why he didn't like the rich: their self-pity. Persecution was the common ground of their conversation, like sport or the weather was for everyone else. He despised them.
"I despise you," he said, but nobody paid him any attention, so engrossed were they in the inequities of higher-rate taxation and the inherent criminality of all employees.
'
--From Robert Harris's novel The Fear Index (London: Hutchinson, 2011; New York: Knopf, 2012)
Also too - maybe I'll reread "The Great Gatsby" this summer.
ReplyDeleteFrom Fitzgerald's story, "The Rich Boy:
"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."
He seemed to know them pretty well.
Or as I've said of Mitt Romney in the past:
ReplyDeleteHe was born on third base but thinks he was cheated of his home run by excessive regulation of the base paths.
smintheus,
ReplyDeleteI am SOOOOOOOOO stealing that line!!!
No, I'm liberating it!
Thanks!