Money feels like a blessing

It’s so strange how intellectually, I understand completely that money is not virtue, and that this is a bullshit illusion that capitalism has wormed into our heads.

But somatically, when I win a handful of colorful chips at craps (I went to the Encore casino for the first time yesterday) and can cavalierly toss the dealers a tip, I feel proud, obscenely proud.

We have no factual information about whether the people in either photo have been winning money, or losing money. And we have no factual information about whether the people in either photo feel close to a state of divine grace. And yet, we absolutely know which is which.

George Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying — on of my favorites of his books— is about the ways that being short on money eats at your sense of self, your sense that you matter as a human being, your sense that you have a right to your share of sunlight, air and breathing room.

Repentant now, when winds blow cold,
We kneel before our rightful lord;

The lord of all, the money-god,
Who rules us blood and hand and brain,
Who gives the roof that stops the wind,
And, giving, takes away again;

Who spies with jealous, watchful care,
Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways,
Who picks our words and cuts our clothes,
And maps the pattern of our days;

Who chills our anger, curbs our hope,
And buys our lives and pays with toys,
Who claims as tribute broken faith,
Accepted insults, muted joys.

–portion of a poem that the protagonist writes through the course of Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

The potted plant that, for Orwell’s protagonist, symbolizes the narrow aspirational comfort of unimaginative middle class homemakers; the aspidistra, he thinks, is in essence the true national flag of Britain.

When I have some money in my pocket, I feel graceful, bountiful. I feel like W. B. Yeats, sitting at a cafe when the light strikes him just right:

My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes, more or less,
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

–from “Vacillation” by W. B. Yeats

We’ve all felt the feeling Yeats names. Do we dare feel it whenever we want?

That the roll of the dice — literally or figuratively — grants this blessing, or takes it away and leaves a curse, is absurd. But the ability to feel this way, at all, is a clue that I might feel this way at other times, when I want to, when I deserve it, and others deserve it.

Which is to say, as often as we like.