Island Fever

What Epstein offered

“There are no beautiful clocks. Everything to do with Time is hideous.” - Robert Aickman

There’s a wonderful, meditative aria at the end of Act I of Der Rosenkavalier (very much in contention for my favourite opera)¹ wherein the Marschallin, a middle-aged woman who has taken a much younger lover, acknowledges to herself the reality that such a relationship is inherently time-limited. It’s far too good not to link to a recording. I mention this because, over the last few days, scraps of the aria, in particular the Marschallin’s admission that “manchmal steh' ich auf mitten in der Nacht und lass die Uhren alle, alle stehn” - sometimes, I wake in the middle of the night and take the clocks and stop them every one - have drifted to the forefront of my mind in response to an infinitely grimmer and less exalted world of Age Gap Love.

The staggered drops of Epstein documentation over the last few months have generated infinitely more heat than light. Responses have ranged from a frankly misguided spate of Epstein Aestheticspoasting on Twitter (which gradually died a natural death in the face of mounting evidence that he was the sort of man who treated TED Talks as profound) to a lurid focus on the most outlandish tips submitted to the FBI on mass human sacrifice and Satanic rituals compered by a man who, if there is any truth to these, would have been the Gilles de Rais of the Caribbean. Certainly, at the time of writing, it seems like there was at least a ‘hard core’ of Epstein confidantes who were engaging in unimaginably appalling practices, either out of the deep existential boredom of the sort that led a collection of mid-level Capitol Hill fixers to regularly participate a decade ago in a ceremony eerily close to a Gnostic Mass or the sort of escalating fetishism that is both unpleasant and fundamentally dull to write about (even Sade, given the opportunity to lay out an entire sequence of escalating perversion in The 120 Days of Sodom, got bored about a quarter of the way through what was intended to be a much longer book and completed it in note form).

My principal interest is in the much wider penumbra of wealthy people surrounding Epstein, the vast majority of whom will essentially escape unscathed: whatever their varying degrees of culpability and knowledge, each was prepared to potentially compromise himself significantly through his connection with a man whose interest in very young women was a running joke in these circles thirty years ago. The idea that wealth and power functioned as a sort of Ring of Gyges allowing them to all act on a universal if normally deeply-repressed male urge to rape children seems implausible: the suggestion, at the other end of the spectrum, that the superficial weirdness of Little Saint James was cover for what was effectively a global insider trading network equally so. Epstein and The Island were together fulfilling some other deep-seated need for most of these men, and I’ve developed a working theory for what it might be.

In the mid 2010s, I was close enough friends with a couple of women operating in that liminal space between fairly mercenary relationships and escorting² to be able to read lengthy messages from what I suppose were effectively their clients. What struck me about the (incredibly lengthy and detailed) fantasies these men, generally wealthy and in their late fifties, wanted to fulfill, was their essential and rather pathetic innocence. These were clearly reenactments of things which they had either managed to pull off as much younger men or things which they felt that they ought to have pulled off if they’d spent less time focused on the Grindset or however you made money in the 80s. These men weren’t embarked on some sort of spiritual descent into the sort of moral nightmare that someone whose wealth and position has untrammeled him from conventional morality might be drawn into. They were trying to achieve the impossible - an ascent above the inexorable march of Time.

Like these women, I have also worked in close proximity to the ultra-wealthy (albeit in rather different circumstances). Time looms upon them in a way inconceivable to the rest of us. After all, our circumstances can always theoretically improve. Above a certain level of wealth, there’s nothing left to do but count the seconds remaining to you as you embark on the slow and steady glide path that leads inexorably to decrepitude and then to death. The most efficient team of personal administrators imaginable only has 86,400 seconds available to you in a day to move around.

Enter a financier with an island where it is eternally Summer, filled with much younger (if probably legal) women who at least pretend to like you. A possibility of temporary escape from the slipstream of Time into a fantasy of a perpetual summer holiday, under an unvarying azure sky (an escape that might be made permanent if said financier’s interest in life extension pays off). Your tritest and most anodyne views are seemingly taken seriously by this man in your email exchanges with him, and for an interval you can shake off the nagging fear that you are gradually being rendered obsolete by a world that is increasingly confusing and frightening to you.

This escape, of course, is wholly illusory. A week here and there over the course of years where trafficked women pretend to hang on your every word, and then the low door in the wall which leads to the enclosed and enchanted garden of your imaginings is slammed shut forever by the FBI and, after that, possible public humiliation in the depths of winter and your meekly resuming your place in the anteroom of Death.

I sympathise with these men to an extent - most of my adult life has been driven by thoughts of a sustainable escape from this sublunary world, and I am morally certain that escape is possible into the Empyrean, that perfect and unvarying world of Order and Beauty where Sophia guides the passage of the planets by celestial geometry. I am equally certain that, whatever escape route exists, it can’t be found in a private island.

1. In my life, I have taken three separate women - two of which had absolutely no interest in German opera - to performances of Der Rosenkavalier. All three were sobbing uncontrollably by the end. Try it sometime.

2. The mid 2010s were a different time, in which our Age’s cold dead Puritanism was as yet a mere blot on the horizon.