Getting up, he hurried into his study, returned at once with two cigarette lighters which he set down on the coffee table. ‘Look at these. Look the same, don’t they? Well, listen. One has historicity in it.’ He grinned at her. ‘Pick them up. Go ahead. One’s worth, oh, maybe forty or fifty thousand dollars on the collectors’ market.’

The girl gingerly picked up the two lighters and examined them.

‘Don’t you feel it?’ he kidded her. ‘The historicity?’

She said, ‘what is “historicity”?’

‘When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo Lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. And one has nothing. Can you feel it? You can’t. You can’t tell which is which. There is no “mystical plasmic presence”, no “aura” around it.’

‘Gee,’ the girl said, awed. ‘Is that really true? That he had one of those on him that day?’

‘Sure. And I know which it is. You see my point. It’s all a big racket.’

[…]

‘I don’t believe either of those two lighters belonged to Franklin Roosevelt,’ the girl said.

‘That’s my point! I’d have to prove it to you with some sort of document. A paper of authenticity. And so it’s all a fake, a mass delusion. The paper proves its worth, not the object itself!’

‘Show me the paper.’

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2004 at 01:23:28 and is filed under General.