I visited one of the elite clubs of the city yesterday with one of my superior officers as he has just joined it and needed my help with the joining formalities. The membership fee itself is close to half a million rupees. I saw people wearing coat and tie and imitating the British (who had originally founded the club) in extreme summer heat. Some of them were grotesquely obese, other were almost senile and yet seemed to me to be obsessed with pomp and show.
$7000 membership fee? Is this club "for gorts only"?
Blessed are the poor? Maybe.
Maybe some of them have bred offspring who will participate in future "Tours of Outer Space."
I am sorry you have to be subservient to such "Lords and Ladies," but at least you do not have to defer to their values.
If I were born into the moneyed class, I'm afraid I might succumb to severe substance abuse.
Again: blessed are the poor? Not too damn poor!
I've never envied the rich, but I can't deny a little envy for Arthur Schopenhauer's "trust fund." Trust fund babies who do not reproduce and live humbly, stretching their inheritance over their lifetime? More power to them. Maybe I do envy them.
I do not envy those who find themselves controlled by their obsessions with making an impression on others. They are totally consumed by the image made in the heads of others. Or maybe they enjoy expensive foods, oils and herbs and massages and all that jazz.
I do not wish to give the moneyed class the satisfaction of thinking I might want what they have. It is ostentatious consumption, where much of the pleasure they experience is in imagining their possessions make those without such resources envious.
What we are in ourselves is what matters most. We each will face our deaths alone. In fact, our entire lives are just a prelude to the climatic moment of realizing we are actually nothing, that the entire world is phantasmagoria.
But none of that matters to us as long as we are these tubes, these feces-filled intestines on wheels.
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