The Restoration of Otto Laird Read Online Free PDF Page A

seventies, it showed no signs of dissipating. He regularly worked eighteen-hour days, while writing a new book, and three times a week ran the circumference of the Bois de Boulogne, usually clocking up a time of less than three hours. Politically, Pierre remained deeply immured in the spirit of 1968 – he had played no small part in the events that unfolded in Paris that May. He knew about the long-term waning of Otto’s political commitment, but there were passages in their correspondence when he remained convinced that the small red flame in his old friend’s heart had not yet died out entirely.
    Otto would not have agreed.
    He doesn’t realise how far it’s gone, he thought, noting with a slight sense of shame Pierre’s tireless activism, and then remembering his own recent afternoon spent communing with an egg.
    It’s not his fault – I’ve kept it all from him. The Bentley, the golf clubs, the beneficial tax arrangements, the underpaid cleaner from the developing world who visits twice a week and tends to our expensive mess. I’m hopelessly bourgeois now, I’m afraid. I’m the class enemy – perhaps I always was.
    But then he knew how hard it was to really change people. He had seen it in others and experienced it in himself. All those noble intentions, abandoned to self-interest. Cynicism, winning out each time.
    It’s such a struggle, trying to keep up the struggle. I don’t know how Pierre manages to do it.
    Otto had learned his lessons the hard way. Throughout his career, he had encountered the brute forces of capital on a regular basis, and he knew the machinations of which it was capable. He had come up against its iron laws many times, when fighting to maintain the integrity of his projects, and usually he had lost. Apartments in his own Taylor House, for example, developed as a serious experiment in social housing, now sold for large sums of money to wealthy young people with a taste for ‘retro’ and ‘urban grit’. The building had even featured on some TV property show: Angelo had sent him the link. The imbecile of a presenter called it ‘funky’, whatever that meant.
    No, Otto thought. Everything has become a commodity nowadays; and maybe every person, too. All of us have become commodities to each other. The profit motive has entered every sphere of life, and its hegemony is complete.
    He was among those who had seen this coming – he had fought against its spread for decades. Finally, sometime in the mid-1980s, he had thrown in the towel, sickened by the grasping cynicism of the emerging generation. Cynthia’s loss had been the final straw, sapping the last of his once steely resolve. And so he had fled to France, where he hid himself away in the mountains, buried in perfect seclusion until he encountered Anika one day in a hillside café overlooking Lake Annecy. She had approached him as he sat nursing a coffee at a terrace table and asked if she could borrow his binoculars. And then, much to his surprise, life had begun again.
    But how could Otto explain all this to Pierre? How could he explain the long and tortuous journey that had brought him to his hillside villa in the Jura?
    Pierre’s a sociologist at the Sorbonne, Otto thought. The man lives in a time capsule.
    Lectures, seminars, late-night discussions at literary cafés – Otto had seen it all first-hand during his visits there in the 1970s. And from the tone of Pierre’s letters it was clear that nothing much had changed. Otto knew the slow, eternal rhythms of academia. He also knew that, for all their brilliance and fine intentions, the people who inhabited that world were as far removed from everyday reality as the average rock star. Otto loved Pierre like a brother. They had been through a great deal together in the old days. But he no longer wanted to read his long and rather boring letters about Foucault. Or reply to them, for that