Help with quote from Babylon Revisited

[xxrsc]

Hi. This is a quote from the short story Babylon Revisited by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I would like some interpretations on it. I just can't seem to quite put my finger on what he is thinking. It is where Charlie is thinking about all the money he spent in Paris before the market crashed.

"It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that now he would always remember - his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont."


What was he trying not to remember? Or why was he trying not to remember them?

[Whifflingpin]

I'm sure the clever people will give deeper interpretations, but it seems to me that Charlie was trying to erase the memory of his dead wife and his lost (to him) son. He was trying to achieve this through whatever he was squandering money on, and, not surprisingly, failed.

.

[xxrsc]

Thanks for the quick reply. But the way I understand it, he had not lost his wife and daughter when he was squandering the money.