Money

 Once or twice in my life, I've had a sudden influx of cash. I don't want to exaggerate—we're not talking about the lottery here. We're talking about the ordinary kinds of windfalls that can occur in an adult person's life: an insurance check after a car wreck, say. Or the sale of a home. But still—enough money that I felt like I should do something with it. 

Another one of these windfalls came my way the other day. And I found myself inwardly reminded of that poem by Philip Larkin. The one where he thinks about the money in his drawer at home, and how it always reproaches him for not spending it. Here I am—says money—ready to be put to use. I'm here to give you a good time. And yet, you just sit at home reading as always! From the way you live, you might as well not have me. Who would know the difference? 

But here's the problem with money: there's nothing actually to spend it on. 

Back when I didn't have money, I think I assumed that people who had money spent it on luxuries because they couldn't help themselves; they couldn't contain their greed and desire. 

Now, I strongly suspect it's the opposite: they are spending it out of a sense of obligation. It's more like the Philip Larkin poem. Their money is reproaching them from its drawer: "Why do you let me lie here wastefully?/ I am all you never had of goods and sex." And so they go and buy the things the world has told them they should want—not because they actually want them—but because it's what money told them to do. 

Over on the Omnibus Project podcast, they told a story at one point about the first time Kurt Cobain started making real money from his music. He went out and bought a fancy sports car—since he figured he ought to use his money for something—to obtain pleasure, fun, prestige, status, power—whatever it is that people spend their lives seeking. 

But once he had it, all his grunge friends made fun of him. So he took it back the next day and bought a used Volvo instead. 

On a humbler scale, this has been my relationship to money as well. The first time I had any of it to spare, I started to buy things. Not because I wanted them, though; but because I wanted to want them. It seemed ungrateful and prodigal of me not to want anything. How unappreciative of that rare and most-desired thing: good fortune. But I kept discovering that I didn't really want anything after all. 

I don't mean this as a boast about my virtue. Again, I tell you: it didn't feel virtuous. It felt like the opposite. It felt like a moral failing on my part. Indeed, I still think I would be a better person if I had more complex and well-rounded capacities for enjoyment. I still think I ought to want things. I want to want things. I just happen not to want them. 

I remember one early experiment in spending money: back when I got an insurance check from a car accident I had in Boston. It was the first time I had money in my bank account that didn't immediately disappear before the next pay check. So I bought a new winter coat I'd been eyeing. It was great. I still have it. I love that coat. 

This gave me my first experience of something that I had previously wanted and couldn't afford, and now could afford (my version of the sable coat that signifies Gloria Gilbert's undeserved triumph at the end of The Beautiful and Damned). 

Misleadingly, it gave me the impression that there must be more things like that. There must be other things I wanted to buy. 

But I've never found a second thing. 

I don't know if this is because there's no other thing in this world that is as good as this coat; or if it's because desire is so closely linked to the incapacity to satisfy it; that the moment that incapacity is withdrawn, the desire vanishes too (the old "fulness of satiety" problem that beset Byron's "Childe Harold"). 

At one point, I even started buying designer clothes. I still have a Fendi sweatshirt somewhere in my storage unit. Anyone who knew me would have said this was outrageously out of character, and they'd be right. I never really wanted or got any joy out of that sweatshirt. I don't think I've ever once actually worn it in public, after buying it. I couldn't bear to; it's insufferably pretentious. I'd be too ashamed to be seen in it. It's like Kurt Cobain driving around in a sports car—I'd feel like a tool and a sucker. So I just wear the same old hoodies I'd been wearing since high school.

I didn't buy it because I wanted it, though; I bought it because I wanted to want it. It seemed life would be fuller and better if I wanted things.

In Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound—his novel about fame and success—the eponymous author's money manager at one point tries to explain to him that he ought to be enjoying his money more. He ought to be chauffeured around New York City in a limo. He ought to be buying designer suits. That's what money is for, after all—to make life more enjoyable. 

As Larkin quotes money in his poem: "look at others, what they do with theirs: / They certainly don’t keep it upstairs." 

But what would I do with it, other than buy more books? Or give it away? But then I'd have less of it. And one thing about money is that—even when it's not good for anything, one never wants to part with it. Indeed, it seems the only thing money is good for—as a character points out in William Gaddis's J R—is to make more money with ("the only damn time you spend money's to make money"—as Gaddis's character puts it). 

This, too, Zuckerman tries to do in Roth's novel. He has to consult a money manager at the start of the book because he's never had money to invest before. He just kept his money in a drawer. So, the investment advisor has to explain to him "what happens" when you just leave money lying under a mattress somewhere. 

I wouldn't have understood this either. Time was that I couldn't imagine investing money. I thought: if you were lucky enough to get it—why would you immediately gamble it away again? Why would you risk losing what had been so ardently desired and hardly acquired? 

It was only the events of the post-pandemic inflation that made me realize that there is no such thing as keeping money without risking it. If you just sit on your money, in the form of cash under a mattress, you are still taking an investment gamble—it's just, you are gambling on the purchasing power of the dollar. You have invested on the assumption that the rate of inflation will not climb too high. And—as we've seen in recent years—that can be a pretty lousy assumption. 

This is something I didn't realize about money until I had some of it: money never just sits there. You lose it gradually even by keeping it. 

Or maybe you keep your money in gold. Is that a way to make it permanent? Nah, that's just another gamble; it merely happens to be a particularly risky gamble on the value of a single commodity. (I recall seeing an ad from a gold trust the other day—they quoted a number of common phrases ("golden opportunity," etc.) meant to convey the staying power and eternal value of gold. But they left out one quotable phrase about gold that also comes to mind: "Nothing gold can stay.")

So, the best one can do to keep one's money is to spread it around. Since one has to gamble with it no matter what one does—one might as well hedge one's bets. One might as well gamble on as many things as possible. This is called diversification. It's what every advisor recommends. But it's still a queasy feeling. It means taking money in one form and risking it on an uncertain proposition.

It often seems indeed that the only reason to have money is to keep it and get more of it. There's your Weberian "worldly asceticism" for you. But—there is a contradiction inherent in a society where everyone follows this principle. After all—the only reason any money makes more money is because someone, somewhere down the line, is actually spending it. Someone must want to buy things, or incur debts in order to buy things—otherwise there would be no income from money for the people who have money. So, someone has figured out how to spend money on something other than money. 

Who are these people, and what do they want, and why do they want them? They spend money on all the pleasures and rewards of human existence—on homes, cars, families, power, status, etc. "By now they’ve a second house and car and wife: / Clearly money has something to do with life," as Larkin's poem puts it. I salute them; I'm glad they've figured out how to get something out of money other than money. 

But I, like Larkin, can't quite see the point, in my own case. I am destined to prove a great disappointment to money. From money's perspective, I've been a bad investment.