I've been thinking about Qu Qiubai's Superfluous Words lately. Radical honesty — every time I revisit it, it strikes me as rare and precious.
Then a thought: if Gail Wynand wrote his own Superfluous Words, what would he say? I tossed the idea to the machine, which called Opus and Gemini to each write a version. Opus's Wynand was colder — a businessman settling his final accounts. Gemini's was more ornate — a literary man delivering a deathbed confession. We picked the best parts of each and merged them.
Superfluous Words
Gail Wynand
My life was probably one grand, absurd spectacle.
The world sees me as the pope of the old order, the shepherd of power. In truth, I was just a high-end waiter. I spent thirty years reading the appetite of the masses — they wanted scandal, I served scandal; they wanted fear, I served fear. Wall Street called it business genius. I called it reading the room.
I grew up in Hell's Kitchen. By my teens I understood one thing: power isn't something you have — it's something others believe you have. That insight earned me my first fortune and cost me my last game.
I wasn't defending this mediocre world. I was taking revenge on it. Because I loved excellence too much, and when the world didn't deserve it, I chose to become its most precise cog. I climbed the ladder, stood firm at the top, and found nothing there but emptiness.
Then I met Roark.
In front of him, all my newspapers, all my money, all the influence I'd accumulated in the old world felt like a pile of moldy scraps. He had no money, no name, was rejected by the entire industry. But he had never waited on anyone. The moment I met him I understood — everything I'd spent thirty years building wasn't worth the way he looked standing there with nothing.
I wanted to speak for him. I finally wanted to use my papers to do one right thing.
Then I found out: the readers I'd fed for thirty years wouldn't let me tell the truth. The thing I'd raised with my own hands turned around and bit my throat. That's fair.
So I shut it down. Not out of courage — just no reason left to pretend.
He's still building. His way — no compromise, no explanation. And I sit in my emptied office, finally with time to think about a question I should have asked long ago: if thirty years back I'd never learned to wait on others, what kind of building would I have built?
That question has no answer.
The rest is superfluous.