A RESPONSE, in the name of REASON, to the once again misinformed and inchoate ramblings of VON MUSTARD.

Sir:

Your purchasing of ever more unsound artifacts and investments is merely an etiolated attempt to abrogate that corroding emptiness which now, as ever, threatens to replace what little is left of your God given soul. A real man, a man of science and rationality, declines to wear the deceitful gew gaws of wealth, recognizing them for the spiritual albatrosses that they indeed are. He rejects the gaudy chandeliers of your false investments, recognizing their lights as mere will o' the wisps. A man of the Modern Enlightenment is forced by those very faculties which define him to instead ornament and light the halls of his life with the single purifying candle flame of REASON!

You speak, sir, of your undying love for, and deep comprehension of, art, but alas, you are as one who carries a daguerreotype of a popular starlet, and moons at this pallid imprint of silver halide thinking it real. I assert that Euterpe, my dear Matteus, has never shewn to you her true face -- an unspeakably beautiful, yet equally cruel face she reserves for her true lovers, for those who suffer for her!

I was once like you, and wallowing in my obscene wealth I purchased warehouse-rooms of art, and furnished my horse stalls with the finest Turkish baubles and glass trinkets from the Dark Continent. I thought in my blind vanity that I owned enough culture to become its absolute arbiter. In reality, I was like unto a hairless mole-rat, tunneling through my rooms of hoarded gold, looking to suckle from the teat of the muse of art, but doomed never to find her.

After some time spent in this pitiable condition, I finally resolved to apply the lens of reason, that ever faithful glass, to my problem, and thus find resolution to my aesthetic malaise. I began by swearing neither to eat nor sleep nor remove myself from the confines of my laboratory until I found my solution. And so, for some days on end I thought deeply about why I could not feel the bliss of true knowledge of art. And, day after day I came no closer to a resolution, but still I held fast to my methods, and neither ate nor slept.

At last, after what seemed the passing of many ages, I felt a hollow shell. I could neither speak nor swallow, and could barely see or think. My eyes wheeled about the room independently as I slaved, committing even my last breath to this problem which rocked my soul: "why cannot I feel joy from these possessions, though I own even the finest and most beautiful, the most prized of aesthetic objects?"

And then, at once, as though by chance, my eyes, flitting about as I concentrated my last reserves of thought, alit on an object I had not seen before, nay, could not even recognize in it's glory and pristine beauty. In its physical structure it resembled, and slowly I began to see it was indeed, an old bristed cleaning-rod left some weeks before by a chimney sweep. But in my state of SUFFERING, it seemed a thing wholly not of this world, but from some place far, far better.

And in that moment the solution, so simple, presented itself. Only through the gates of the most egregious suffering can the divine face of art be truly seen. Less than a week later I had completely rid myself of all my many treasures, (donating them to some local "cabinet of wonders") which had so blinded me to their beauty by my very possession of them.

I live in the gutters now, true, and my health is not good, but when I visit my former belongings in the museum, I am shocked by their beauty.