Bonfire for the Envious
on vanity, giant boats and missing out
For my trip to Vienna, I brought a novel from home - Second Place by Rachel Cusk - instead of allowing myself an airport romance for the plane, a decision I regretted immediately. Relating to a character is great unless the character makes you look bad, and vacation is a bad time to look bad.
“I’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathizes with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathize all that much with myself.”1
I judged a woman for taking a picture of herself in a mirror flanked by Egon Schiele paintings in the Belvedere. I imagined what would happen if each grotesque figure was backgrounded by mirrors, allowing viewers to snap pics of their own shiny faces in the crook of a leg, the hollow above a hip bone, the space between two lovers’ sunken chests.
Really, I felt left out. I saw myself pacing the fringe of a semicircular crowd of tourists before Klimt’s Der Kuss (The Kiss), tourists tittering and shimmying with iPhones raised as they took turns posing with the painting. I was aware of the contrast between my teary eyes and the mean set of my mouth, and ashamed of it. Part of me wanted to elbow in and tug the arm of a man standing there and make him kiss my cheek in front of all those people. I was ashamed of that, too.
My pious condemnation of the vanity of others made me feel worse about myself, and I museum-walked straight into envy. They didn’t know I was building a falò delle vanità in my mind to burn their Instagram accounts and they wouldn’t care anyway. They were happy with themselves, I was made ugly by burnt fingertips and singed hair.
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“Burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest
burning”
The fire sermon and death by water,2 god why do I always think of T.S. Eliot when I’m depressed?
“Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers.”Ezra Pound cut so much out of this section he called the birth of the poem a Cesarean. What an asshole.
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I saw a picture of that new cruise ship on Twitter and imagined it churning up the mashed potato remains of billionaires on the sea floor. It takes a lot of vanity to challenge the sea, I think. Really, I think, their vanity is so far down that a 250,000 ton ship would pass over unnoticed.
“Here's the thing: A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay.”3
David Foster Wallace wrote this in a (very long) review of a luxury cruise for Harper’s Magazine in 1996. The weirdness works thanks to the construction of “various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay.” Meticulous, disciplined self-improvement is one such fantasy, constant entertainment to “drown out” the inevitability of death is another.
Nothing DFW wrote about the sickening liminality of a cruise ship has anything to do with my delightful stay in Vienna. Vienna is a city firmly planted. It is clean but not sterile. The new buildings blend respectfully with their elders. University students and monied visitors seem to coexist at every street cafe. Even the restaurants slinging “das original” wiener schnitzel for tourists felt dignified.
Maybe the catastrophic implosion discourse got to me, or maybe I was feeling some lingering heaviness from my last essay on social media. Whatever the cause, I felt claustrophobic in my body, in my self-image, in images of me. Even in the old churches and galleries, even in the palaces. I felt pent up in how humanity imposes itself on everything, how it fills the world with walls, how everything, even grief, becomes a room with a ceiling and a door.
I was annoyed at a group of teens making TikToks in an imperial garden and simultaneously envious of their boldness. I was annoyed at how unkempt the hedges were - surely they’re supposed to be perfectly rectangular. I pent myself up in Instagram stories and recap Reels and felt better.
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One evening after dinner, when the last bit of sunset turned the white buildings pink and dove blue, I walked with a man through the city and it unfurled itself in front of us. Our feet followed our eyes from one architectural marvel to the next, down one ancient street and another and another. Time made itself docile, a stray cat winding through our legs.
Flânerie is the point of vacation, perhaps of life, at least to me. Flânerie isn’t entertainment, it doesn’t claim to be adventure or “exploration,” a term rich people use to make voyeurism sound purposeful. Flânerie is a way to feel unbound and embodied at the same time. We can’t walk forever, we can’t cover much ground, but we can walk and breathe and look around for an hour and have an hour’s respite from unpleasantness.
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“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
Cusk, Rachel. Second Place. New York: Picador, 2022.
Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed July 17, 2023. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land.
Wallace, David Foster. “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise.” Harper’s Magazine, January 1996. https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf.
Eliot, T. S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed July 17, 2023. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land.
Very well done... So many thoughts to keep, "...humanity imposes itself on everything, how it fills the world with walls, how everything, even grief, becomes a room with a ceiling and a door."