I think for much of the middle classes, nothing could be more fantastic than to have a contact with fame. But once you have that contact with fame and find out how vacuous it is, that it doesn't answer anything or supply any ultimate revelation to cosmic dilemmas and you're still left with yourself, then it's back to the drawing room with fading light and one light bulb out in the very expensive chandelier that no one has bothered to replace.

It does seem like if you're an interesting person and you have endless amounts of money to indulge your fantasies, then those fantasies will be plagued with guilt about that level of indulgence. It really becomes a self-defeating exercise in pursuing hedonistic desires in any sort of normal or guiltless fashion.

If money doesn't come with misery, then it's not at all interesting and it's not at all fair. It seems if you have all this money, and no misery, you're really in a world of unalloyed happiness, and that seems to violate some deep principle of universal justice. We tend to live in a culture now where people have unbelievable, inconceivable amounts of money without any kind of remorse.

Nothing is drearier than just always telling the truth about yourself. Rousseau, who as far as I can tell was a pathological liar, made this wonderful distinction between lying, which he said there was something wrong with if you were trying to extract an advantage for yourself or evade responsibility for some nasty thing you'd done. But if all you're really trying to do is impress or keep it young or make life more vivid and interesting, go for it! There's no real harm in doing something like that. I think people can be overly saddled to the truth.

I think for much of the middle classes, nothing could be more fantastic than to have a contact with fame. But once you have that contact with fame and find out how vacuous it is, that it doesn't answer anything or supply any ultimate revelation to cosmic dilemmas and you're still left with yourself, then it's back to the drawing room with fading light and one light bulb out in the very expensive chandelier that no one has bothered to replace.

It seems when the madness sets in the mix of wealth and seductiveness, it's never the first generation that acquired the wealth; they had to be quite savvy. That savvy-ness probably meant you were some sort of alpha person. That alpha stuff in the later generations, you still have the intelligence, but it tends to manifest itself in bipolar disorders and inestimable amounts of depression.

Aristocratic depression has this cosmic dimension to it, where it's asking these big questions about, "Why?" "What is the purpose of all this?" Neuroses of the middle class is the banishment of aristocratic depression, because it's kind of this obsession with quotidian detail that pushes these larger questions away.