54: “To love what Death doesn’t touch”

Though we have just passed spooky season, an autumnal chill lingers in the air as our pumpkins still attempt their garish smiles through sinking features, turning inward. This season, to me, beckons long evening sessions with blankets, books, pens, and sticky notes in a glowing pile of paperback adventure. 

In October, I read The Secret History by Donna Tartt for the first time. I had read The Goldfinch over a year ago, and Tartt’s narrative voice never left me, so when I came across the former at a local thrift store in perfect condition, it rode home with me. 

What is it about Donna Tartt’s writing? The culturally appointed queen of “dark academia” evokes the aesthetic and literary phenomena associated with old collegiate institutions, dark woods, tweed, black coffee, and a mysterious, brooding disposition evoking the intellectual™. There is also a layer of upper class social milieu, an “old money” exposition in these famous novels that is hard to overlook, for better or worse.

In the broadest strokes possible, The Goldfinch features a museum bombing and a stolen painting in the hands of a boy that tragedy follows like a shadow, while The Secret History features a group of (mostly) rich college kids studying Greek classics who perform a deadly bacchanal. Both stories have themes of darkness, familial legacy, social expectations, and moral dilemmas of the jail time variety. Also, both novels' protagonists are young boys learning to be men, somewhat thrust into adult life without guidance or safety nets. This creates a sense of reckless abandon, that despite all the thinking in the world, the youth learn best by doing and failing catastrophically, consequences are not certain.

“‘Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely”(The Secret History, 41).

This quote from The Secret History reminded me of the dramatic loss of willpower featured in literary classics like The Stranger by Albert Camus and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. This idea of repression is central to Tartt’s writing, with friendships that cross into the homoerotic, fights that go too far, and lies that compound into explosive showdowns. Tartt blurs the line between elevated reason and the human animal instinct into romantically intertwined fear and desire. 

Who will love me? 

What have I done?

“‘Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It’s invisible, erratic, angelic. What could possibly be better, from our point of view, than allowing [him] to choose the circumstances of his own death?’”(The Secret History, 255).

Death is the ever-present shadow in both The Goldfinch and The Secret History. Death hovers close by and is only ever a couple of pages away from suddenly appearing through a quickening pace as a horrid, sudden skull and crossbones for a character, a friendship, a way of life. 

“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 ignominously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch” (The Goldfinch, 771).

The Goldfinch, oil on panel, by Carel Fabritius, 1654