Seventeen stations, each composed of twenty-two sections of traders and machines, each trading securities of up to ten listed companies. This is the Stock Exchange, ladies and gentlemen

 

---- This is a truly overwhelming production of images (Nancy said) But this time the character's awareness didn't quite match the intensity of the pleasure with which you described the core of the experience; I deduce, however, that the trance was so deep that it retained the right words and images, a genuine aura appearing in the text at the end of each sentence (.) -----, she concluded. Life seemed never to have forced Nancy to admit, much less to abandon, a single one of her intellectual pretensions. Still ardently determined to be the world authority on literary criticism, that morning she seemed to me to be extremely severe about the right and wrong in everything I wrote. At another stage of the experience, the morning's "audition colorée" allowed me to grasp her aura as an ornament, an ornamental envelope in which she was immersed as in a case. The night before, I had seen her talking with Senator Dole, another great alleged American beacon of intellectuality. ---- In 1817 (she told the Senator) a seat on the NYSE was worth $25. In the boom years, in the late 1990s, the price reached $4 million. In 2006, finally, it became a public, for-profit company, and all its seats were exchanged for cash and stock. Today, any trader can only buy one-year licenses (.) -------, she concluded. She didn't seem, on that cocktail party night, to have shied a single inch from the idea that every word she uttered was of the utmost importance. But perhaps nothing, other than Van Gogh's paintings, had ever given me such an authentic sense of aura as Nancy's vision. Audition colorée: the words that came out of her mouth that night were immediately transformed into flickering fragments before my eyes; waves of intellectual fragments that organized themselves into patterns inside my brain. An old and noble flag of nuclear deterrence. Nancy remained unrepentant, in the Senator's conversation circle, brandishing to the world that rigid image of a high-society Super-Lady that she had made of herself, and it was. --- Seventeen stations, each composed of twenty-two sections of traders and machines, each trading securities of up to ten listed companies. This is the Stock Exchange, ladies and gentlemen. Commissioned traders working for brokerages, selling stocks to the public as they rush from phone booth to station and back again. Only specialists deal with a single stock, reporting quotes to traders. And independent traders operate on the floor under orders from brokerages (.) -----, she said. Nancy, to me, was the very embodiment of the six or seven billion traded by more than two thousand companies per day on the Exchange. The golden plumbing of the SuperDot, above the noisy confusion of the floor. Then the "realists" of the American political class took over the chatterbox: that tribe of "experts" in making and unmaking invisible deals, masters of the most shameless ways to politically annihilate an adversary, using the media, the market, and government espionage to their advantage. ----- Finally, only the moral concerns. Makeup to appear on television (.) ------, Nancy whispered in my ear, as soon as the Yankee crony circle began to utter that old unrealistic, imposture-ridden litany about all the gray horizons of American politics.