at second hand

Spiegelman gingerly unpacks the title poem from that book, calling it “autobiographical, perhaps at second hand, but not revelatory.”

My new self, while it grew up in the shadow of the old, had often heard the other speak of Albertine; through that other self, through the stories it gathered from it, it thought that it knew her, it found her lovable, it loved her; but it was only a love at second hand.

“We don’t run much into clerks, because there’s only one Jaggers, and people won’t have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see ’em?

“It is out of books,” he wrote in “Travels With My Aunt,” that “one learns about love and pain at second hand.”

Plenty of psychiatrists have pushed back hard against the so-called “Goldwater rule”, which prevents them from diagnosing the psychological failings of public figures at second hand.