This salutary mental exercise is not at all what F. Scott Fitzgerald was talking about, by the way. His endorsement of holding contradictory beliefs comes from “The Crack-Up,” his 1936 essay about his own irreparable brokenness. The opposing ideas he has in mind there are “the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle.” Samuel Beckett later put it more succinctly: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
