ALL THE HABITUAL STORIES OF A REAL LANDED GENTRY

160. ALL THE HABITUAL STORIES OF A REAL LANDED GENTRY (nyc 1968):

It always seemed as if you heard the same stories and tales over and over : family matters the cruise the yacht the Rover 2000 the Bentley grandfather's two Matisses dad's oil interests and rail cars and of course Buddy's prep-school record : and though I never got tired of hearing them I did get tired of hearing them - something like slowing down to look at a car-wreck along the roadway or something - there were always a suicide or two a terrible debilitating cancer and long and slow fearsome death in Arizona or something and the 'final' trips to Barbados or Vegas for Hedgwig or someone before he dies : always some gibberish and it used to send me up a wall to think of the money these folk spent Christ! just for lunch three times a day and then there were always the first editions the expensive and framed signatures and historic memos of Civil War people or early old Presidents the African relics the gun collections and the ancient Roman coins in slip-case collection boxes in one of the safes the signed photographs of this or that person and of course the diplomas and certificates attesting to this or that and none of that included the bonds stock notes treasury bills or bank books either - so to these sort of people family business really meant something and with each tick of the clock it all literally grew - when you reach a certain level of wealth amazingly it seems that TIME itself then begins working for you as a slow steady and advanced liberal creep of interest rate advancement and compounding constantly take place in every recess and corner of even the darkest night hours and it all works to your benefit in increasing that wealth and not just 'holding' it (taxman be damned) but at the same time all that money requires more money to pay those who service and keep it and the possessions it brings - so it all becomes a muddy hole and a running situation which gets expensive and I used to think that maybe at some other level we're ALL the same no matter rich or poor because it's all relative then with needs and expenses as the money whether meager or great brings with it itself by its own workings necessary needs (in that sense I was as rich as the richest in that having a dollar brought of itself NO need for another while to them having a dollar probably meant needing another 30 cents or so just to keep it) - funny how all that works yet no one among us really sees it in its relative fashion being as we are each all caught up instead in the getting or the giving of it all.
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Perfidy is a mind's-eye problem and I found that to be just as easy as true - everything's in how we view it and even the supposed definitions of good and bad and evil and right (as you may have noticed) change well over time and flip back and forth over on themselves - we hate the Russians we hate the Germans we hate the Japanese we love the Japanese we find wrong and evil here and later there and then that very same evil is seen as a 'working and positive good' and such flip-flops and changeovers are sequestered and isolated and then brought out again in textbook and assumption after a time to begin all over again their strange ways of counting : and so no one really can claim a prescience nor a lock on to what will be ever or may and because of that perhaps you may as well just go with the flow and most of the many times I had a revelation it was about 'response' to things - I found that there really wasn't a way or a need to respond and that silence is the best response and not everything needs a response nor does one have to have an opinion about everything - there just are certain things you need not take a stance upon need not reflect nor consider - and that became one mark of my own distantly-dawning maturity (it was John Cage too who at one or another of those lectures I'd go to spoke something perfect about responding with the response of a silence which is nothing but a nothing responding - or something like that) and all those terms and names and figments and forms and diagrams and assumptions (as those just above) are false wrong twisted and evil themselves because nothing of that sort of 'being' even exists and those are all man-made-up categories and distinctions and so therefore only is silence appropriate to such a quality of wrongness (all based on false logic in that A never equals A and most certainly never leads to B but these are the things called mystery and the sort of matter most people never touch).