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Sparkle (5)
I didn't want to sell my engagement ring -- more out of obstinate pride than any sentimental reason. When my husband and I got a divorce, I did the tasteful thing and offered to return the ring to him. He told me to keep it. Leaving a cushy executive job made sense if one was going to be a wife. But surely I didn't think this silly notion of supporting myself as a writer was going to work out? "Keep it," he said. "You'll probably need to pawn it before the year's out."
Exes are really good at pushing our buttons. But I wasn't about to give him that pleasure. I withdrew the ring, pivoted in place and left.
Photo by Jessica Diamond (Flickr).
Though the year that followed brought with it a lot of writing work, it was still very much a recession. With most publications preferring to contract writers than hire them, my days were spent not only writing but chasing after unpaid invoices and honing my skills at composing payment demand nastygrams in terrifying legalese.
One day, a large media company for which I had spent a significant amount of time developing a story informed me that no, a check wasn't due to me until the story started generating significant pageviews. I knew that I had never signed a contract to this effect, but having just moved, I couldn't locate my copy.
Stuck with no income until I could locate the contract or someone else came through on their invoice, I remembered the ring with a twinge of bitterness. I'd planned to hold on to it for a long time yet and then do something really crazy with it after I became irrefutably solvent through my writing -- like give it to the next up-and-coming writer who had given up the cushy office and steady paycheck to follow their dreams.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, I reminded myself as I walked into the jeweler's. What I found out inside confused me. The jeweler wasn't interested in buying it. And when I finally found one willing to buy it back after a handful of futile attempts, the amounts they quoted weren't even remotely close to the sum at which the diamond had been appraised. The highest was less than a third of its supposed actual worth.
I didn't sell it. That night, I found the contract and was able to set things straight as far as my finances were concerned. But the difficulty I encountered trying to sell it never stopped bothering me. And then this week, I encountered an article in The Atlantic from 1982 that laid it out for me quite clearly: a diamond's "worth" is little more than a product of vary careful image management.
The diamond invention -- the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem -- is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value -- and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.
The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as "The Syndicate." In Europe, it was called the "C.S.O." -- initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company. And in black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with names like Diamond Development Corporation and
