Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall...

Will Wilkinson writes:

A personal blog, a blog that is really your own, and not a channel of the The Daily Beast or Forbes or The Washington Post or what have you, is an iterated game with the purity of non-commercial social intercourse. The difference between hanging out and getting paid to hang out. Anyway, in old-school blogging, you put things out there, broadcast bits of your mind. You just give it away and in return maybe you get some attention, which is nice, and some gratitude, which is even nicer. The real return, though, is in the conclusions people draw about you based on what you have said, about what what you have said says about you, about what it means relative to what you used to say. People form expectations about you. They start to imagine a character of you, start to write a little story about you. Some of this is validating, some is irritating, and some is downright hateful. In any case it all contributes to self-definition, helps the blogger locate and comprehend himself as a node in the social world.

I am not The Epicurean Dealmaker.

It is worth reminding you periodically of this, O Dearly Beloved, because as Mr. Wilkinson notes the persona to which you ascribe the words you so faithfully read on this site does not exist. For that matter, the persona you ascribe to Will Wilkinson—“Will Wilkinson”—does not exist, either. It is a construct, formed partially out of the meaning, motivation, and character you impute to the words he writes and the actions and interactions he pursues on the internet among an audience of people who are personal strangers to him. He sketches the outline of his character with words, and he and his readers fill the picture in. Whether the creation of an online persona is a primary motivation for personal blogging, as Mr. Wilkinson maintains, or simply a (hopefully) beneficial side product thereof is not really my concern. But everybody does it.

Some of the motivations behind this character creation are the same or similar for everyone who blogs: we want our online persona to appear smarter, funnier, wiser, better-read, and more articulate than we are in real life. Some of them are more unique to my own situation and adopted persona: I want to appear richer, more powerful, better connected, more successful, more handsome, and more wicked here than I am in actuality. In any event, these exaggerations or deceptions add up—we hope—to create an online “self” that is more compelling and admirable than our own and in whose reflected glory we can bask our gratified egos. We tell ourselves that yes, my online self is the real me, me as I want others to see me, minus all those embarrassing, incidental flaws and imperfections which do not define me as I would be seen. As I want to be. As I really am.

Of course this is nothing new. People have been trying to manage their social identity ever since we crawled out of the muck to the first backyard Mastodon barbecue. The distinction between private and public personae has existed as long as there has been a public sphere to create the latter; as long as we have interacted repeatedly with a relatively stable group of other human beings. Masks and pseudonyms have existed as long as we have had society, too, even if it is just Grog posing as “Grog” or Joe Smith posing as “Joe Smith.” For most people, their masks fit their faces pretty well and look pretty much like their true selves. But masks they still are. Our interior selves are too mutable, ephemeral, and contingent to make even the most transparent person match his or her public persona consistently and coherently. Our public selves are costumes we don to interact with friends, family, and strangers so they know whom they’re dealing with. Perhaps we don these costumes to remind ourselves who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to act, too.

Fredrik deBoer is correct to note that blogging has not democratized expertise or authority. But blogging—and, frankly, all the different flavors of social media—has democratized our ability to create, control, and broadcast our online social personae to a much greater extent than ever before. In the past, the non-famous among us moved in relatively small private and public communities, defined and limited by extended families, current and past friends, and work and social acquaintances. Our masks fit tightly to ourselves, because they had to: everybody who knew us knew us too well, for too long, for us to fool them into thinking we were someone we were not. The exceptions were limited to those who literally cut themselves off or hid their true natures from society: the criminal, the loner, the “deviant,” the mentally ill. Creating public personae out of whole cloth was limited to those public figures who had access to a platform to broadcast their creations to the wider society of strangers: books, newspapers, podiums, movie cameras, and the like.

Now, any old obscure investment banker with a case of scotch and a laptop can create, cultivate, and grow an online character which, thanks to forces completely outside his control, becomes widely known among thousands of strangers and takes on the force of reality for private and public persons alike. In less egregiously fictional and more subtle fashion, so can a real person like Will Wilkinson or Freddie deBoer manufacture, through the simple act of publishing their words and participating in online discussions, a more perfect, coherent, and clear simulacrum of himself. These simulacra become known as “Will Wilkinson” and “Freddie deBoer” to tens of thousands of strangers who have not and likely never will meet the authors and therefore will never learn how they differ from the originals.

* * *
What I find interesting in all this is the irrefutable fact that my pseudonymous online persona, which matches but does not match my true personality and situation, has become far more widely known than I am in real life. This creates some odd juxtapositions for me, and the occasional disorienting feeling that my Frankenstein monster has taken on a life and a will of its own. The reasons I created TED in the first place still obtain, and I do not anticipate revealing my true identity anytime soon. But it is occasionally disconcerting and humbling to realize that were I to do so, the overwhelming reaction among You Dear Readers would likely be disappointment and regret.

I suppose that is reason enough to continue this charade. It is always wise to remember you are less interesting, intelligent, and entertaining than you would like to be. The funhouse mirror which is this website reminds me of that every day.

The person who experiences greatness¹ must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

— Frank Herbert, Dune

Related reading:
Skin in Which Game? (February 10, 2013)
Fragments (February 26, 2010)


¹ Or, shall we say, episodically impressive pageviews.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

A Fine Disregard for the Rules

I’ve been trying to figure out how to share with you, O Dearly Beloved, just why it is that the current snowballing trend of reducing working hours for junior bankers in my industry¹ is so wrongheaded. Clearly, I am swimming against the tide here, as now Credit Suisse and Bank of America have joined the political correctness police at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan to dissuade our nubile young apprentices from their traditional practice of working hours that would make a Southern slave overseer of the 1860s blush.

The unwashed commentariat continues to flog the canard that investment banks are doing this so they can compete against the innopreneurial juggernauts of Silicon Valley for all the special young snowflakes of Dartmouth, Yale, and Oxbridge. Perhaps there is a contingent among the benighted paper pushers of investment bank human resources departments who believe this too, but I have attacked this superficial notion thoroughly and, in my opinion, effectively in the past. Suffice it to say here that 1) since Wall Street is shrinking we don’t need as many junior resources as before, 2) the number of college graduates who simultaneously aspire to be J. Pierpont Morgan and Steve Jobs (or even Bernie Madoff and Mark Zuckerberg) is now and always has been nil, and 3) if having an in-house masseuse, pool table, and artisanal toast barista is important to your career satisfaction, you were never going to last longer than 15 minutes on Wall Street anyway.

Good riddance to all such rubbish, say I. And I am not alone. Like many industries in secular eclipse, we will fall back on our traditional recruiting pool of hardcore finance junkies who find an elegant DCF model and a sharp suit far more exciting and satisfying than virtual farm animals and flip flops. À chacun son goût, dontcha know.

* * *
There is another angle which a few more perceptive observers have been pursuing on this topic, however, that deserves to be addressed. This is the contention that the fabled 80, 90, and even 100+ hour workweeks and almost constant weekend work which junior bankers have been known to suffer (and competitively crow about to all who would listen) do not mean said tyros are working hard that entire time. Rather, they are the result of massively inefficient work processes. This observation is absolutely correct.

Rare is the Analyst or Associate in Corporate Finance or M&A who rolls into the office before 9:30 or 10:00 am on a workday,² and rarer indeed is the one who actually starts to do anything really productive prior to the time senior bankers begin streaming out of the office at 7:00 pm. So well known is this phenomenon that even ex-lawyer-cum-derivatives-structurers from the capital markets side of obscure banks can write authoritatively about it. This is not, pace certain sociologically-oriented observers,³ due solely to the fact that senior bankers want to haze juniors like they were hazed in their youth, or that it is a conscious program of brainwashing designed to leach out whatever shreds of self-preservation and flimsy moral scruples said youngsters might have left after four years of elite higher education so they can promote our deviously immoral plots against all that is holy and good in society for senior bankers’ personal gain. Not solely, anyway.

No, this massively inefficient workflow arises organically out of the nature of the work we do. Typically, a junior banker will roll into work relatively late because she was at work until midnight, one, or two o’clock the previous night finishing the corrections or first draft of a presentation or model which a senior banker dumped on her desk before he went home and demanded be put on his chair overnight for when he arrived in the morning. It will often take several hours, if not all day, for the senior banker to review the changes and give them back (for why, see infra), so the junior banker will fill her morning with odds and ends of other projects or deals she is working on plus the inevitable conference calls with clients and internal meetings on live and prospective deals. Afternoons are more of the same, with the addition of new assignments and working meetings on current projects with immediate superiors like Associates and Vice Presidents, who will always have their own corrections, suggestions, and annoyances to impart to the beleaguered young banker, plus informal conferences and bullshitting sessions with her peers in the bullpen. Add to this workflow pattern the complication that most junior bankers are working on multiple live and prospective deals or projects at the same time, all of which are in various stages of completion, activity, and panic level, and you begin to see that a junior banker’s workday is one of constant juggling and interruption.

This pattern applies in corporate finance and M&A generally, as bankers at every level have their mornings consumed by reacting to overnight developments in the news and their own ongoing projects and their afternoons and early evenings consumed by internal and external meetings and conference calls which are designed to push said projects further toward completion. Senior bankers like me, who are responsible for originating and closing all the deal revenues which pay for this goat rodeo, come in to a stack of presentations and models to review, a stack of emails and phone calls to and from clients and colleagues to reply to or initiate, and a calendar chockablock with conference calls and meetings with deal teams, colleagues from other departments (who actually do much of the work we get paid for), and, of course, the all-important client. And this is just on non-travel days, when we actually have a full day in the office to “catch up” on this shit. Rare is even the most well-intentioned senior banker who is able to carve out 20 or 30 minutes to review the presentation a junior banker turned overnight for him before his clients and capital markets colleagues leave work at the end of the day and the telephones stop ringing. Many a time have I rolled into the office at 7:30 am fully intending to turn my comments on an urgent pitch waiting for me on my chair by the time the Analyst or Associate comes in at 10, only to get to it for the very first time at 7:00 pm. This is commonplace.

Similarly, senior bankers, if they are lucky and doing their job, will come up with new assignments, projects, and prospective deals during the course of their phone calls and meetings each day. Given the relentless interruptions senior bankers are subject to themselves (see supra), it is the extremely rare (read nonexistent) Managing Director who calls up the poor slob Vice President tasked with distributing assignments to Analysts and Associates (known to IBD management as “The Staffer” and junior bankers as “That Asshole”) to request staffing on a new project before he runs out the door at 7:37 pm to catch the booze car back to Darien. This is when the put upon Staffer tries to snare an elusive Associate or Analyst before she sees him coming and stick her with a new assignment. (The role of Staffer is the poisoned chalice of Vice President-hood in my business.)

And given that my business, as I have attempted on many an occasion to pound gently but relentlessly into your Well-Meaning and Charming Little Heads, is a client service business, the temptation, thrust, and almost universal practice for anything we do is to do it as soon as possible. After all, if we don’t spread the S&P 500 into Swedish kroner for the client by tomorrow morning, those fuckers at Morgan Stanley certainly will. That means overnight, and that means little Suzy and Billy are going to forgo getting laid for the sixth Friday in a row so their Managing Director can deliver an LBO analysis to the Corporate Treasurer of Google on Saturday which he will not read until Tuesday at the earliest, if he even remembers to take it home. This is what is known colloquially among the denizens of investment banking bullpens as “Living the Dream.”

* * *
So, to a perceptive observer, the life of a junior investment banker in corporate finance or M&A looks pretty lopsided:⁴ lots of interruptions, busy work, and futzing around during normal working hours, and hard, sustained project work overnight and during weekends. It is certainly different from that of their peers in capital markets, who typically work very intensely from 7 am to 7 pm Monday to Friday, then go home and relax or party with friends and family on nights and weekends. From the perspective of a capital markets banker (I was one, briefly, many moons ago), it seems like corp fin and M&A bankers dick around at very low intensity most of the day. They rarely notice the latter only turn on the afterburners after they and pikers like me go home.

And, speaking as a former junior banker myself, I must say working overnight and on weekends, while often a pain in the ass, could actually be pretty pleasant. On weekends in particular, you could roll in after noon, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt if you wanted, and put in three to twelve hours of solid, uninterrupted work on the presentations and models you had in your inbox before you left to down some beers or equivalent with your non-working pals. Being able to focus intently on a difficult model or a tricky presentation without some asshole Managing Director or Vice President breathing down your neck or regaling you with some dipshit story about the strippers he had in his Hamptons hot tub last weekend could be pretty sweet. Given that you’re going to grind through the work anyway, it’s nice to be able to do it without constant interruption.

Of course, there is another very real, very important reason lots of work gets done in investment banks during weekends. It is the obvious, best time to consummate mergers and acquisitions, when public markets are closed and the last minute scrambling on deals can’t kick up disruptive rumors or market movements.

There are lots of reasons i-bankers work on weekends. One of them will be recognizable to the meanest intelligence: Merger Mondays.
— Epicurean Dealmaker (@EpicureanDeal) January 13, 2014

That, plus the complications introduced by the frequent occurrence of clients having the audacity to conduct their deal business in different time zones:

"Sorry, Suntory, we have to knock off work on your $14 bn merger until Sunday morning, US time. Little Joey wants to get laid tonight."
— Epicurean Dealmaker (@EpicureanDeal) January 13, 2014

Which is why, at the end of the day, Your Contumacious Correspondent thinks the no- or limited weekend policies Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, and Credit Suisse are foisting upon their minions are so stupid. They certainly won’t stop clients making insane demands (or, what is the same thing, Managing Directors agreeing to or even suggesting such demands in order to curry favor). They certainly won’t change the ineluctable dynamic that meetings and phone calls during the day not only prevent much productive work from being done but also create new work to be delivered tomorrow. They absolutely won’t make Managing Directors refuse to take a client phone call or host a meeting to close a deal just so they can give a new assignment to some 23-year-old before 5 pm. All they will do, if everybody observes them to the letter, will be to push work that could be otherwise done productively and relatively painlessly over the weekend into the lobster shift on weeknights. That sounds like a pretty shitty tradeoff for twenty somethings in my book.

* * *
Of course, nobody who has any drive, ambition, or cleverness is going to pay the least fucking attention to these nonsense rules. The Analysts and Associates who find ways around them, and who deliver high quality work when it is requested and needed—not when some never-been-a-banker HR weenie says it should be—will be noted, cultivated, and rewarded disproportionately by their superiors. The clock watchers and slackers who religiously follow the weekend work prohibitions will be isolated, paid badly, and given lukewarm recommendations. The only possible good outcome they will have is being able to lie about being one of the rule-breaking, 100+-hour-working Wall Street badasses to impress their Zynga and Snapchat interviewers after they get constructively fired from the Street. Given how justice seems to operate in the world, such clowns will probably end up internet multimillionaires anyway.

Nobody ever said Wall Street was fair.

Related reading:
The Invention of Leisure (November 12, 2013)
In the Nation’s Service (December 29, 2011)
Come Fly With Me (February 12, 2011)


¹ As usual, I speak of junior bankers on my side of the house—corporate finance and M&A—who actually do work insane hours on a regular basis. While the novice denizens of the sales and trading side of the house also work hard, although differently (see supra), none of them regularly clock 80, 90, or even 100+ hour weeks in pursuit of the almighty shekel. The sales and trading floor is almost always emptier than a western movie set at high noon and quieter than a tomb after 7:00 pm on weekdays and anytime on the weekends. If anyone other than skeleton staff passing trading books from their time zone to traders in another is actually at their desk during those times, you can damn well bet Risk Management and Compliance would like to know why.
² I have picked up and made my own a phrase which a senior banker once offered me in centuries past: “You could fire a cannon through the bullpen before 9:30 am on a weekday without fear of hitting anybody.” Interestingly, senior bankers like him (and now me) often try to get into the office much earlier on non-travel days—like 7:30 or 8 o’clock—because we can get more work and planning done before our clients start calling and our assistants start pestering us for three-week-old expense reports.
³ The argument that junior bankers’ hours have no functional utility but rather are simply of a kind with the widespread hazing rituals many social organizations impose on their initiates is spurious itself for three major reasons. First, it ignores the why of the tradition, which I have laid out at length above and elsewhere, in favor of the how. This simply begs the question. Second, as at least one commenter to the linked piece notes, if hazing investment banking juniors is supposed to make them unthinkingly loyal to the bank and industry which does it, it is remarkably ineffective. Junior bankers do wear their trials, real and imagined, as a badge of pride, but it conveys no loyalty to the bastards or firm who did it to them. It is an undeniable fact that bankers of any seniority will jump to another firm at the drop of a hat (or large signing bonus). If anything, the hazing of junior Analysts and Associates weakens and destroys the reflexive loyalty and gratitude to their employer most of the innocent young lambs bring to their jobs when they are first let in the magic door. Lastly, the hazing we do does little to degrade the moral compass of our young charges. At most it just makes them more cynical about large bureaucratic organizations and disillusioned about the charms of my profession. Rare is the first or second year Analyst or Associate who has to make a decision with the least moral content whatsoever; they just have to decide at 3:00 am whether to do the 30 page Excel model or the 60 page Powerpoint presentation first.
⁴ Of course, you can see a couple of things worth noting if you have been paying attention. First, the 80, 90, or 100+ hour workweeks are never planned. They arise organically out of the junior banker’s project load, normally because two or more of her assignments go live and active at the same time. There is nothing to do but gut it out when that happens, and that means working 16 or more hours a day and going home at 6:00 am to shower, change, and return to the office. Second, these stupid work limitation rules are really only coming into effect now because most corporate finance and M&A bankers don’t have enough productive, money-making work to do in the first place. As soon as the market turns, you will see these rules die an ignoble and unremarked death.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Duty

Ansel Adams, Oak Tree, Snowstorm

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

— Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Happy New Year, my friends. May you find satisfaction in your duties, joy in your pleasures, and sufficient occupation in both.


© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Greatest Hits of 2013

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from “Ulysses”

Once again, O Dearly Beloved, it is time to look back on the year just ending to see if we can draw any useful lessons. As usual, I am drawing a blank. I tend to find such annual retrospectives uninteresting, since in my experience that which is meaningful in life does not come prepackaged in neat, calendar-year-sized chunks. Nevertheless, through the page ranking magic of Google Analytics, at least I have the ability to share with you those ten posts which you, My Most Attentive and Discerning Audience, have anointed the most popular of my works in Anno Domini Two Thousand and Thirteen.¹

This is the seventh year I have maintained this site, with greater or lesser diligence as the spirit moves me and non-blogging obligations allow. Seven years is a long time in any relationship, as marital psychologists and Tom Ewell alike can tell us. We will see in the coming year whether you and I can sustain our little pixellary romance, or whether like all good things this relationship must come to an end. I make no promises other than to be myself.

But do not think of that now. Look back on 2013 and revisit the year’s greatest hits, as determined by you. Enjoy.

THE CANON, 2013 Edition:

1) Curriculum Vitae (March) — Your clear favorite. A career précis for young investment bankers which lays out the path from wet-behind-the-ears tyro to grizzled old veteran in corporate finance and M&A, with summary descriptions of the roles and responsibilities at each step along the way. Any silly young fool who wants to join my industry after having read my scribblings over the past seven years should absorb this piece as a final gut check. If you still want to become a banker after that, well, then you are beyond my emendation.

2) The Invention of Leisure (November) — Goldman Sachs, Great Vampire Squid of yore, confused many an observer when they recently instituted a policy which for all intents and purposes appears to treat its most junior investment bankers as a species of near-human. I explain why this is neither as humane nor as sustainable as it may appear, and remind my attentive readers that, in my industry, “it is always the human beings who are taken out behind the woodshed and shot first.”

3) Go Ask Alice (September) — In which Your Ever Patient Guide to Financial Markets uses the occasion of an impending IPO for an obscure ornithologically-themed message service to explain, for the umpty-goddamnedth time, just how initial public offerings work. I’m sure it had no effect on the bullheaded financial commentariat this time, either, but I published it anyway. Call me stubborn. I’ve been called worse.

4) Mr. Indispensable (May) — Wherein I propose with animated language that the Grand Poobah of überbank J.P. Morgan, Jamie Dimon, be stripped of his Chairmanship for having done an absolute crap job at it. A few of you read it, but absolutely none of you did anything about it. Story of my life.

5) In Praise of Jargon (April) — In which I take the occasion of a sneering, uncomprehending excoriation of business jargon to “reach my hand across the gaping divide between those who work for a living and those who cannot understand why they have to to proffer a little gentle education.” I also seize the opportunity to take a few cheap but deserved potshots at British English, while I’m at it. Chomskyan giggles all around.

6) Go Ahead, Live a Little (May) — Do investment bankers take sabbaticals? Hell. The fuck. No. This piece explains why not.

7) To Whom It May Concern (August) — “Most of what happens to individual investment bankers can be boiled down to being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time.” Luck favors the prepared, but preparation is no guarantee. Good luck, children.

8) A Photograph, Not a Circuit Diagram (January) — Wherein Your Humble Correspondent attempts to puncture some recent hysteria about bank accounting and explain that, no, the impression it conveys that banks are scary, opaque, and complex is exactly correct, salutary, and entirely the point. I suspect my missile sailed far over the heads of its intended target, but hey, it gave me a chance to string together some more words. As I do.

9) Skin in Which Game? (February) — Apparently unsatisfied with picking twitter fights with economists, financial commentators, and other riffraff, a certain author and aficionado of heavy rock lifting and public attention decided to attack Yours Truly for the veil of pseudonymity which I bear in this public forum. I responded with a balanced explanation of my longstanding rationale, which no doubt failed to satisfy the aforementioned interlocutor. Upon reflection, I discover that I could not give a rat’s ass whether it did or not.

10) Our Glassy Essence (October) — Wherein Your Friendly Would-Be Epistemologist turns his skeptical eye upon scientists, specifically those who claim that science has killed philosophy. I explain that no, Philosophy is not dead, but rather is sneaking up behind Science at this very moment to kick it in the balls.

* * *

Finally, lest you think me concerned solely with popularity, here are a couple more cognate posts published this year which the procrastinators and neurotically obsessive among you might find entertaining, notwithstanding their failure to pierce the top ten. Given the weakness in the overall market, I’m afraid this is all the bonus most of you are going to get this year. And no, you can’t sell it for three years.

Bonus Twaddle, Time Wasters, and Suchlike:

10 Reasons I’m Not Posting Anymore (August) — About as detailed an explanation as My Loyal But Disappointed Readers will ever receive for the paucity of my posting in this opinion emporium, sadly. Innumerate, too.

Wherein Your Droll, Semi-Victorian Bloggist Jumps the Shark (January) — Some eager young beaver from the seething cesspit of the cultural avant-garde—Brooklyn, New York—interviewed me on behalf of his bearded, literary, plaid-shirt-wearing audience for some inexplicable reason. While the experience is unlikely to get me to trade my lion skin for skinny jeans and a goatee, you might find it amusing.

Pip-pip, and all that. Happy 2013.


¹ As I have explained before, the Google Analytics data is necessarily incomplete and potentially unreliable, as they miss the actual eyeballs harvested by each respective post from the far greater numbers of people who simply visited the home page of this humble opinion emporium when they were first posted. But let us presume, entre nous, that this ranking is fit enough for purpose here, shall we?

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

The Parting Glass

Georges de la Tour, The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, 1640

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

— Voltaire

Curatio funeris, conditio sepulturae, pompa exsequiarum, magis sunt vivorum solatia, quam subsidia mortuorum.

— St. Augustine, Civitas Dei ¹

* * *Michel de Montaigne writes of the duty we owe to princes:²

We owe subjection and obedience equally to all kings, for that concerns their office; but we do not owe esteem, any more than affection, except to their virtue. Let us make this concession to the political order: to suffer them patiently if they are unworthy, to conceal their vices, to abet them by commending their indifferent actions if their authority needs our support. But, our dealings over, it is not right to deny to justice and to our liberty the expression of our true feelings, and especially to deny good subjects the glory of having reverently and faithfully served a master whose imperfections were so well known to them, and thus to deprive posterity of such a useful example. And those who out of respect for some private obligation unjustly espouse the memory of a blameworthy prince, do private justice at the expense of public justice.

One could say the same about parents, with minor modifications. Part of growing up is becoming aware that one’s parents are human beings, with all the flaws attendant thereto, not the omnipotent and omniscient gods of our infancy. This, speaking from my personal experience, can be quite a blow, especially if the revelation is received early enough in one’s life.

My father was a brilliant engineer, troubled by his blue collar origins. He struggled to make his way through life with, as he put it, one foot in the world he came from and one foot in the present. His family did little to help him. My mother was brilliant, too, in her own way, and struggled with different demons incubated in the privileged upbringing of her family. Their marriage early produced me, too early really for a man and woman not far removed from childhood themselves. It did not last long. I was raised an only child of divorced parents who struggled separately to be parents, and who only partially succeeded. The timeline and details do not matter here—for my life is not a commonwealth I share with others to whom I owe a duty of honesty, outside my immediate family—but suffice it to say I became estranged from both my parents. Age and distance, sadly, did not improve our relationships.

My father died many years ago, succumbing finally to the demons he never fully escaped. My mother died within the past two weeks. I have not been overwhelmed with grief, for estrangement acts as a kind of grieving itself, sapping the heart of love, delight, and admiration in slow anticipation of the final separation of death. I am sad she is gone, of course, because she was my mother. You cannot help but love your mother, no matter how worthy you think she may have been as one.

* * *They say as you grow older you become your parents. I am no spring chicken, but I have not seen this yet. Of course I have some of their flaws (or at least those flaws I am aware of) in addition to my own, but I have spent a great deal of effort trying to become a better man and father in reaction to the mistakes I saw my parents make. Let us say, then, that one grows in reaction to one’s parents, good or bad. My efforts, good or ill, will be judged in time by my own children.

In the meantime, I have made peace with my parents in my heart. If nothing else, they meant well, and they tried to do what they thought was right. We can ask little more, even of ourselves.

I am not here to render public justice. And as for private justice, there is only love.

But since it has so ordered been
A time to rise and a time to fall
Fill to me a parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all.
So good night and joy be with you all.

— Traditional, The Parting Glass

Goodnight, Mom and Dad. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.


¹ “The arranging of funerals, the conditions of burials, the pomp of obsequies, are rather a consolation for the living than any help to the dead.” (Trans. Michel de Montaigne, “Our Feelings Reach Out Beyond Us.”)
² “Our Feelings Reach Out Beyond Us," The Complete Works, Trans. Donald M. Frame. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 10.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.