Picture longing for an inaccessible, distant place. Call that longing farsickness. It is in form the same as homesickness, but it lacks the emphasis on memory. The homesick are exiles who remember somewhere they once were and would like to return to. They include Ovid at the Black Sea, Genji in Suma, and Vladimir Nabokov wandering the USA. They are nostalgic for paradise lost. They look back. The farsick differ only in being anticipatory rather than nostalgic. They look forward to a place they have not been, whose aspect is mostly hidden from them, a place they are not certain of getting to. They are hopeful but not confident. They include Dante Alighieri’s Ulysses setting out on the open sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules and Augustine lamenting the incurable restlessness of his heart, seeking rest in a god who cannot be found in the world. For the farsick, the world is landlocked yet pungent with the occasional salt scents of the sea, scents that puzzle and beckon. They love the world and are alive to its beauty, but it is not a place they can be at home in. What they want is not here, and so neither are their hearts.[1]
Christians are affines of farsickness. Some are virtuosos of it. This is because the god they are devoted to is only visible in ambiguous traces. Those traces include love, persons, beauty, liturgy, mathematics, music, Scripture, and the infinite excess of the nonhuman orders. There are traces, but it is not possible to unmediatedly and completely embrace and be embraced by the Christian god within the spatiotemporal order that is the world. Such an embrace, which is what Christians most want, what they are sick for, what draws them, has leaving the world as its precondition, and given that death is the ordinary way of leaving the world, Christians welcome it as a necessary portal while at the same time fearing its opacity. Their funerary rites and preparations for death therefore braid hope and lament tight together, and their lives in the world do the same with delight and disappointment. They are never fully at home in the world; their hearts are not in it.
Christians also see the world as damaged, and this too is a cause of their farsickness. For them, the world cannot be perfected; the burden of its damage can only be lightened, not removed. Finding life as it should be, free from the afflictions effected by damage, requires leaving the world rather than perfecting it, and the degree to which the world’s damage is seen as irreparable is a close index of farsickness’s intensity. Feeling at home in an irreparably damaged world is difficult, and the farsick, unless seduced and malformed, neither seek the world / that feeling nor countenance it when it shows itself. The world is for them a theater of spectacular violence and opaque chaos that cannot be fully repaired.
Farsick Christians want to alleviate the world’s afflictions, but they do not want to make the world more homelike or comfortable. That would dilute farsickness and might end in making the world the only horizon of life and thereby dissolving the patterns which connect Christians with their god. Binding wounds and reducing pain is one thing; attempting to remake the world so that it no longer inflicts wounds or causes pain is another. The compassion of the farsick, so far as it goes, attends and responds to symptoms of affliction—bleeding, hunger, pain, loneliness, imprisonment, enslavement, oppression—as they show themselves; it does not concern itself with those aspects or structures of the social order of the world that cause affliction, and much less, even were it possible, with their removal or refashioning. The world is to be tolerated, if it can be, as plants tolerate drought or as subjects tolerate monarchs, until it is left for a situation immeasurably better. The world is not to be repaired; pleasure in it is not to be increased; the delights it yields, which are many, come, when they do, by gift rather than by efforts at improvement, and farsick Christians are happy to leave it so.
Many Christians, however, are not happy to leave it so. The degree to which they are not is evidence of the degree of their malformation as Christians.
Money is a dominant figure in the social order of the world. It is a creature of the collective imagination, which means that its powers work where the emperor’s new clothes are visible, which is nowhere in the material order of the world. Its coins, bills, and negotiable financial instruments are present in the material order, but without the glister given them by collective imagination, they can do no monetary work; they are merely matter. That work, the work of money, is to serve as a receptacle into which possibility is poured. The possibility is of a future transfer of goods. Money defers such transfers by subliming them from the material into the social order and there holding them in suspension in the form of a contract to be executed by spending, which is what effects a transfer of goods.
Spending, however, does not use money up. Instead, the spending of money moves it from one place to another, changing its shape and location while preserving its central characteristic, which is that of possibility. Money is “something almost being said”; when handed over in exchange for a non-monetary good (a house, a kiss, a succulent apple), it speaks a clear word but does not thereby lose its power to subsequently speak to others.[2] It is, so long as enough of its users agree that it is, inexhaustible and fluidly so. Its users, however, are not. They can be exhausted by money, spent out by it, used up by it.
Money is an elegant, if rococo, means for effecting the exchange of goods. Its elegance lies principally in the many ways in which it exempts itself from what it effects. To exchange a wheel of cheese for a suit of clothes is different from selling the cheese for cash that is later used to buy clothes. The cheese and the clothes are goods independently of their capacity for transfer by barter: you can eat the cheese or wear the suit. Cash is not such a good. Its is entirely defined by its power to effect transfer of things other than itself. That power is what it is, a power imagined and donated by its users for work in the world’s social order. And cash is only the beginning of money, its crudest form.
To the farsick eye, money brings some blessings to the world. It alleviates some of the world’s afflictions with an élan made possible by its subliming from the material into the social order and by its power and reach there. Money is fluid and shape-changing and unconstrained by the recalcitrance of material things, and in the frictionless forms it has assumed, and in the complex instruments responsive to those forms, money permits and encourages transfer of goods at scale and with nuance impossible were such transfer effected only by barter in the strict sense, as quid pro quo. This is why money is effective at binding affliction’s wounds.
That is, it is difficult to accurately or precisely quantify the role of money in alleviating affliction, but it has clearly helped reduce the ordinary afflictions of sickness, hunger, and physical pain. It has done this unevenly, but it has done it: most persons alive now suffer those ordinary afflictions with less frequency and intensity than most persons who were alive a millennium ago. Christians, even those strongly attuned to farsickness, see, celebrate, and participate in this alleviation. Such uses of money do not attempt to repair the world or make it more homelike. They lighten the load a little, instead, by attending and responding to symptoms rather than by trying to identify and eradicate their causes.
But, of course, money does not limit itself to alleviating afflictions. It offers also, and often instead, autonomous security: complete insulation from the afflictions of material lack and the depredations of others. This is not the lightening of such afflictions should they occur; it is the attempted removal even of the possibility of their occurrence.
This offer of radical repair is difficult to refuse. Money promises, or at least shows and beckons toward, a condition in which every desire is immediately realizable, a condition in which nothing and no one can take from us our ability to get what we want when we want it. Money tells us we can shield ourselves from what we would rather avoid when it threatens and that we can keep what we seek once we have it. Money is the promise of perfect security and autonomy. It is a secularized version of the place the farsick yearn; it is what we imagine that far off place would be if it were found in a world as damaged as our own. It is the eschaton of the farsick realized. It is the world transfigured by money.
This transfiguration, the perfection of security, cannot be delivered; even the very rich have only its approximation. It is nevertheless a lure that informs the attitudes and actions of almost everyone, and when the farsick look long at it, they, like everyone else, are diverted by its glamor toward being at home in the world; they become contented participators in and eager contributors to the damage the world does to us and we to it. Money’s grandiose offer of security also encourages solipsism. Attending to money and seeking money moves the afflictions of others toward invisibility by intensifying our focus upon our own future security.
In making the offer of security, money acts as demons do, which is also to say that we, money’s imaginers and sustainers, act in that way too. Demons show, and offer, things which cannot be had in the world, such as unsurpassable sensory delight, unchallengeable mastery, the moment in life when everything is as it should be, the end of war, and the perfection of politics.[3] The pursuit of such things malforms even the approximations of them with the result that Christian enthusiasm for binding the wounds of the injured and providing food to the hungry is diverted by money into more grandiose schemes—that is, when such enthusiasms are not dissolved altogether into a drive to amass wealth for the provision of our security.
The reach of money contributes to the plausibility of its offer of security. Anything priced is within its reach, and almost everything is priced: money-based economies do not easily tolerate goods exempt from price, and by now, even the goods most intimately associated with human bodies—blood, eggs, wombs, semen, organs—are priced and, therefore, bought and sold. Care of the body and food for the soul can be purchased with enough money, and are ordinarily, now, unavailable without it. “Capital burns off the nuance in a culture,” and chief among the nuances it turns to ash are unpriced goods.[4] That there is so little unpriced makes it plausible to see money as the only thing needed for security and to see security as the only meaningful goal. There is no far place in such a scheme; within its bounds, farsickness ceases to be a longing to live by and becomes a disease to be cured. The occasional salt tang from the sea in a landlocked world is scrubbed from the air by money, which, itself without smell, has the capacity to take all scents into itself and there to neutralize them.
Money has come to seem more reliable as a bulwark against material and social need than anything else—more than Leviathan (as likely to kill as to protect), more than beloveds and friends (subject to death and betrayal), more than churches (incapable, now, of offering even token alleviations), more than offspring (unreliable, themselves damaged and eager to cast off the parental burden). If, therefore, you want the security of knowing that you can have what you need when you need it, get money. That is the standard and now almost inarguable recommendation made by money’s acolytes. The recommendation is the lifeblood of a money economy, and it seems by now as self-evident as the claim that you should breathe if you want to live.
Money’s peculiar contractual nature further buttresses its offer of security. The contract provides those who have money the power to obligate others to themselves but scarcely obligates them to others. We decide whether, when, and on what to spend our money; others, however, once the goods they hold are priced, are more or less obligated to transfer them to us if we offer the price. When this unidirectionality of contract is seen together with money’s reach, the place of other persons in the security it offers shows itself. They become those over whom we have power but who have no power over us. That is closer to the acme of envy than to that of pride, for envy’s hallmark is the desire to remove goods from others rather than to arrogate them to ourselves, and the point of holding all the money in the world, were that possible, would not be to have it but to make sure that no one else could, by having any of it, resist our money-given power over themselves or exert their money-given power over us. Then, and only then, are we fully, autonomously secure.
Responsiveness to money’s grandiose offer leads to a desire for its accumulation, for as much wealth as can be had. For the farsick, accumulation of wealth falls somewhere between an amusing irrelevance and a hellish obstruction. Money, for them, is necessary only to provide necessities for themselves and those who depend upon them and to alleviate (not remove) active afflictions. Should they come to have money that provides them more possibilities than those, they give it away, whether directly to afflicted others for alleviation, or by simply loosing it into the world. One thousand—or one million!—dollars in small bills might be stacked neatly on a bench in a city park on a windy day to be blown away and picked up at random; or electronic transfers to randomly selected accounts might be made, as local technology permits. Such giveaways provide what money always provides, which is possibility. They are not sacrifices for the farsick but recognitions of what money is and is for in a world that cannot be perfected and must be left behind.
Accumulation of money beyond necessity is as puzzling to the farsick as the possession of more shoes than can be worn in a lifetime or the hoarding of more perishable food than can be eaten before it rots. Wealth beyond necessity bespeaks trust in the possibility of security and desire for that security; it bespeaks also status and power in economies where money is the principal provider of these social goods. The degree of a Christian’s farsickness is thus the degree to which such things—money’s gifts, and in particular the gifts given by accumulated wealth—are without interest. The farsick look not at money for what it can give them but rather through it for how it may be dispersed into the world.
Possibility—what money is—can be magnified by scattering; scattering can help to decrease concentration, which is what wealth is; and the giveaway that refuses knowledge of the destination of what is given is the closest approach possible to the pure gift, a gift of the kind that Christians understand their god to have given them. In giving money away blindly, without reference to the merits of recipients or the ways in which what they give will be used, Christians approach what their god has done for them by bringing them into existence, sustaining them, and promising them future and full intimacy.
In the book of Genesis there is a just-so story about the origin of linguistic diversity. It shows humans with only one language, able to communicate and cooperate frictionlessly. Their plans and purposes are transparent to one another, and they decide to make a name for themselves by building a tower that will reach heaven, which, if they succeed, will remake the world into the far place by bringing heaven to earth and raising earth to heaven. Their god, the god of Christians as well as Jews, looks down on this with dismay and says that without the friction provided by linguistic difference humans will do it. God then provides the friction by confusing their language and making them unable to easily understand one another. The tower is left incomplete. There are now distinct and mutually incomprehensible languages.
Language, like money, is a creature of the imagination. Suppose that both language and money, when fully sublimed and therefore no longer subject to the recalcitrance of the material order, can also, together or separately, make an edgeless social world, one without frame or limits or exit, in which all social and material needs are met and in which there is therefore no death. That world would be this one remade. There would be no need to leave it and no possibility of doing so. It would be heaven’s simulacrum, just as the babeltower was intended to be. In it there would be complete, unassailable security: the babeltower would be a place of frictionless, edgeless money movement, as well as of frictionless, edgeless communication. The god of the Christians, however, would not be there because the babeltower would be in and of the world, and the aspiration to build it is an aspiration not for alleviation but for radical repair, whether by means of money or words—the one as the reflection of the other. Had the babeltower been built, and the god acknowledges that it might have been, it would have done what money aspires to do. We, we humans, are, as ever, trying again to build it now, and money is our principal device for doing so.
The Christian god’s confusion of that aspiration is not merely negative. Babel is overcome at Pentecost, when those listening to the apostles’ preaching find themselves able to hear what is said in the language most familiar to them. There is transparency and frictionlessness there too, but it is of a different kind than Babel’s monolingualism. It is the transparency of the gift: words are given without expectation of return and without knowledge of their recipients’ conditions or purposes. No name is made or offered by the words spoken at Pentecost except the name of the one spoken about in them.
This gift of words—this giveaway of words—is what the farsick do with language: donation carries the scent of the sea, the far place where the hearts of the givers are. That their hearts are there is what makes the giveaway here a matter of delight for them, not one of effort or struggle or discipline. So also with money. Its giveaway builds no edifice and seeks no goal. It is, rather, what seems to the farsick the paradigmatically proper use of money, the use in which all other uses participate and to which they are transparent—even, or especially, the expedient use of money for the alleviation of affliction. Money’s offer of autonomous security is confusing to the farsick, and they confute it by refusing its perfecting of the world in the interest of leaving it.
Death holds the key. Those who die—and all do—perforce donate their money, their language, and their flesh, all without remainder. The god who resurrects and is resurrected gives back, after death, only flesh among the giveaways death requires. The farsick see this, and they see also the inanition of money’s grandiose offer. Money’s advocates and acolytes, those who amass it as wealth, would abolish death if they could, and in that they aspire to give first place to their own names.
[1] Thank you to E. M. Forster for his story “The Machine Stops,” The Oxford and Cambridge Review (Michaelmas term 1909): 83–122; and Robert Burns for his song poem, “My Heart’s in the Highlands,” both of which inform this essay and are echoed throughout. Thank you to Arvo Pärt for his setting of Burns’s poem and to Bob Dylan for his elaboration of it in the song of the same name, each of which captures something essential about farsickness. And thank you to Teju Cole for his photographic evocation of farsickness in Fernweh (London, UK: Mack Books, 2020); to the Emperor Vespasian (perhaps) for the conceit pecunia non olet; and to anyone else I should have thanked but have forgotten.
[2] Philip Larkin, “The Trees,” in The Collected Poems (London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1993).
[3] See Augustine, De divinatione daemonum and Confessiones, where he writes fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.
[4] Don Delillo, Underworld (New York, NY: Scribner, 1997), 784.