Author: Amory Crane

An Address to the Moneyed Reader

It is probably an indication of intelligence, or at least of a considered mind, to weigh seriously the importance of one’s times. After all, the momentousness of the day is a question of acute self-interest to members of the critical and commentariat class. The more grave, pivotal, and of immediate consequence they can persuade one to view the ephemera of today, the better they may elicit one’s attention. ‘May you live in interesting times’ is then not so much an expression of irony as an incantation of the press man’s eager heart. If sometimes he feels the need to act as catalyst he will no doubt acquit himself by referral, in tones both scientific and omniscient, to the Observer Effect. Alas, whether or not our times truly are momentous this writer can only speculate. ‘Nothing ever happens!’ is the cri de cœur of the clear-eyed and highly cynical of today — never perhaps have they been closer — and many a man has been made to look foolish for clamouring about the depreciated standards of bread and circuses, or the rising costs of a trip to the lupanar, to which he attributes the imminence of the fall of Rome.

Yet, whether these times really are a fulcrum, a moment by which the trajectory of politics, economy, culture, and theories of Love, Honour, and Modernity are all to find their concerted direction into the remains of our century, or whether the seed lies dormant in our barren soil, one thing nevertheless is clear: we must all find a way to live. It is true that beneath this brave o’er hanging firmament of ideas and strategy there remain, as there always have been, legions of men for whom survival means nothing more than the perpetual endeavour to reach Friday night. One almost envies them. But there are others, ordinary men for whom the higher planes of life are not entirely closed off, and whose instructed natures have made it impossible for them to entirely forsake reaching beyond quotidian matters, in order that they might feed these surviving yet atrophied yearnings.

Learned men outside the universities, brandishing their Spengler and their Evola, their Schmitt and Bertrand De Jouvenel, will no doubt question the existence of such men. I can only say that I know them. They are the type of man who works in places like the City, in insurance firms and merchant banks, and has his tastes formed by the mean algorithm of Amazon and a few choice articles in online periodicals, along with whatever passes for liberal education in Britain today. The result is that between such books as The 48 Rules of Power and Why We Sleep he reads Plato’s Symposium with genuine pleasure. After a long week at the office he spends his Saturday morning in bed reading The Story of Art. Such a man will inevitably have a girlfriend, or at least a passing flame, who will eventually recommend — depending on her temperament — that he reads The Feminine Mystique or the novels of Iris Murdoch. More often than not he does. He may be perplexed or somewhat bored by them, but he nonetheless feels a vague obligation to engage seriously with the thoughts and feelings of the opposite sex, and anyway it is easier than having to listen to workplace gossip. Yet, reaching for phrases granted him by his worn out culture to express his attachment to this girl, he finds he speaks in a langue de bois. Words born of feeling turn to ashes in his mouth.

The result is that in the contemplative hours of a not inconsiderable portion of those who form the up-and-coming members of an influential class in our society, there stir considerable but aimless passions. It is true that these young men are conditioned by and have learned by rote the catechism of contemporary life, but it is clear this has catered nothing to their souls. Having gone to university, and having earned a degree in the hopes of making money — indeed, in this some have, to a greater or lesser extent, succeeded  — they have found, in their more reflective moments, that their knowledge of the human heart has never touched the depths; that their teachers were content to offer them only the shallows. It is for this reason that they reach for copies of Thomas Hardy and Dostoyevsky between their readings of Sapiens and Freakonomics.

Let this then be something of a raison d’être. For the aim of this regular diary is to offer something of a flavour of what reading Literature can do for man in the 21st century, and to share whatever small fruits I have garnered among the hungry. Perhaps it is foolish. To bridge the gap between the Forex trader who, though ignorant, has nonetheless acknowledged in his quieter moments something of a lack in his soul, and the saltier, wised-up, and engagé members who make up the rearguard action of our modern culture is no mean feat. But it is necessary. For though the ‘modern man’ of stocks and bonds wears his modernity with no shame, it is becoming clearer by the day that beneath this patina-thin act, revealed by long friction with his own temperament, are the more vitalising tones of his deeper needs. These stock attitudes have been nothing short of a placeholder for his greater yearnings and desires. This, of course, should come as no surprise. The older men of the institutions in which he moves, who shepherd the young recruits, beguile them with tales of the late 80s and 90s, of The Big Bang and Black Wednesday, and of long booze- and drug-induced hours of what amounted to a new kind of wild-west, peopled by cow-boys dressed in double-breasted suits and contrast collars, goggle-framed glasses and geometric pattern ties, before the frontier was closed in 2008. These young men pass the stories between themselves like travellers of ancient times. Films like Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street are their Iliad and Odyssey; Gordon Gecko and Jordan Belfort their Achilles and Odysseus. To the attenuated reality of their daily lives they add savour by a constant projection of such virtues — as they see them — that these films and legends present.

To endeavour then to lead this thirst for life, thus far only precipitated by the chasing of money, to the deep well of beautiful arts and letters is an act of the utmost importance. If you doubt the reason, you need only ask why the richest men of today — who sit richer than Croesus — produce no beautiful buildings, patronise no artists or poets, and offer no succour to those who attempt to live a life of art and letters. Whatever you wish to say about arts councils, writing fellowships, scholarships and bursaries, the fact remains that between the grinding cogs and gears of this hideous engine we call modernity the artist still lives out of his overdraft. 

It is then no mere flourish to describe modern life and man’s place within it as a labyrinth. Walls of ignorance surround him, and distraction pursues him relentlessly like a Minotaur. Given there is no cease of the assault on his attentions, whether by news, statistics, video commentary, advertising, pornography, muzak, where can art find space? It is all that one can do to evade the inferno of the reality instructors, the simulacrum of real life presented at every opportunity. That there are some who make the attempt, or who know they ought, is cause for tentative hope. For it is this writer’s belief that if the common reader is lost then it is his duty to find him, to help usher him from the enraged beast and to lead him by Ariadne’s thread to the place he has never truly known, but which he nonetheless grasps intuitively as his birthright. For the tragedy of men today is they were born into this labyrinth — they did not enter freely.

If then I imagine this not uncommon reader, returning home from his job at Lloyd’s of London or Goldman Sachs, and eschewing the fripperies of the passing moment to read deeply from the works of Turgenev or Dickens, Mann or Celine, Amis fils or J. G. Ballard, I am reminded of all of us who over the past ten or so years have recognised a lack, a distinct paucity in our education. We, who have groped blindly for what we needed, and with trial and error have begun piecing together what we had inherited broken, have come a long way. Let this not blind us to the fact these young professionals are just now beginning to broach the same problems. They may still shrink from the endeavour and that they are neither artists or thinkers is beside the point. They have a need for art which they cannot quite account for, and which has not been addressed by the world in which they find themselves. The only question then is if such administrators and moneyed men are to remain (and I fear they must) then should they not at least have some understanding of the affairs of men, and not merely of candlestick charts and actuarial calculations? That they have begun returning to great works of art is heartening. What they need now is a handle on them. Let this then be a handle of sorts.

Alas, if all this proves a fool’s errand, then at least grant it was a noble one. Because in the last analysis it is up to us unfortunate peoples to nourish what has since atrophied. Few remain who may be called upon. The result is that the wild appreciation of the fruits of imaginative literature, of plastic arts, great music, and tender thought, by which we are capable of furnishing our minds with a surfeit of instance and endeavour in the affairs of men, is in danger of dying out completely. Only by reaching for the experience of other men and times, the better to understand them, can we learn their virtues while dispelling our vice. In short, the aim is to become Great Souled. There is, what’s more, no time to waste. For the universal malady of our times, however important they prove themselves, is the ache where our souls should be. We are lucky we can still feel such pain. For many of us, it is all that reminds us that it remains.

— Amory Crane

Amory Crane is Editor-in-Chief at Decadent Serpent. He covers such topics as Art, Literature, and the more broadly Cultural, reporting straight from the chamber of what Shelley once called the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. You can follow him @LaughingCav1 on X or on Substack. He also writes fiction.