[…] that you can bring to the office downtown. Nostalgia must be the reason for that.

I confess that I'm more than a little nostalgic for the Wall Street in which I came of age. Besides the neighborhood and the people who used to work in it, I am nostalgic for certain departed institutions, ideas, and ideals. I miss the idea of a convertible currency that's convertible into something besides small change. And I miss the ideal of personal responsibility for financial outcomes.

As to this last point, the Wall Street firms of 50 years ago were organized as general partnerships in which the owners, the owners, the other taxpayers, were personally responsible for the debts of the firms they managed.

They next became a limited liability corporation, and said goodbye then to personal responsibility. And they next, more than a few of them, around the year 2008, became wards of the state. Whose idea of progress is this?

So I draw courage in this racial floor never-say-dye downtown neighborhood. It burned in 1776, it crashed in 1929. It stood dark, dreary, and abandoned in the early 1950s when stock prices still had not regained their coolish arrow highs. It was 25 years before the stock market got back to what it was in 1929. At the low ebb of the financial districts' floor since 1952, the Journal of Commerce ventured this: “Some believe that in a relatively few years, there will be garden-type apartments in Manhattan's downtown table who live in the Hudson and East Rivers.”

And so it came to pass.

At the time, it wasn't exactly pinpoint, but here we are. So for temporal and spiritual refreshment, I like to visit Trinity Churchyard, way down on Broadway opposite Wall Street. The permanent easements include Alexander Hamilton and Alexander Gallatin, Robert Follman, and the newspaper publisher Peter Zagart, whose victory in a 1734 libel action helped to establish the precedent and the principle of the freedom of the press. And on the tombstone of the naval hero, Captain James Lawrence, there was a described different kind of principle to which a discouraged artist, or entrepreneur, Mike Malley, don't give up his show. Do you wonder what all this has to do with creativity? I'm not sure I know. But that's everything to do with craft. By craft, I mean in the journalistic sense. I mean reduction of ordered, rhythmic, pleasing sentences. Craftsmanship can in no way be confused with genius, but genius can be craftsmanship. 

Here's a credo of the great 1970 German romantic composer Johannes Brahms. He said to work at it over and over until there is not a note too much or too little, not a bar you can improve upon. Whether it is beautiful is an entirely different matter, but perfect it must be. 

Perfect it must be.

Not a word here about work-life balance. For that matter, not aword about the happiness or the mental health of the creative. "Perfect it must be." 

So genius is God's gift, sparingly disbursed. Talent is rather more generous than apportioned, and craftsmanship is within the reach of really all of us. It is no mean thing, craftsmanship. Elon Waugh, the great wonderful British novelist, calls himself a craftsman. He said, "You have a craftsman's hands." So, "Grass" publishes 7,000 words, or 28 to 30 double-spaced pages every two weeks. I approach each deadline with a constructive sense of dread. Perfect, I have told myself two dozen times a year for the past four decades. It ought to be how merely whatever is. Do you remember the term, "gave" when you read writing that's before you dropped out of school? I have somehow chosen to make that milestone my next work. So what do our words say so carefully, painstakingly, dreadfully, and carefully? Well, they deal with value and integrity. That is the value, or the lack of it, in stocks and bonds and so forth, and the integrity of the currency. We look for mispriced securities that would juristically ride herd on the Federal Reserve. The Fed is, as you know, a central bank. Sets have to achieve the purchasing power of the dollar by two to seven year. It believes in a little bit of inflation lubricates the wheels of commerce, but yet, it sounds like a monetary shock with it. And we have told them this claim is not yet 10,000 dollars worth of talking to them. So money is work, and work is hard meat, and hard meat is hard find money. Hence, my affinity for gold, the legacy of monetary asset, which holds its value, as each of us should hold our value. Money is ultimately a moral question. I have plenty of helps at grants. My name is on the door. On Wall Street, we are another voice in the choir. A distinctive, literate, often contrary, and sometimes discordant one. We see things differently, and not infrequently find ourselves standing all alone. Sophia, as a reader of grants, put it so well, successful investment is like having never gonna agree with you, later. Perhaps that motto applies equally to you, and to one of your every-using peers.

Thank you.