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.” Fitzgerald’s characterization of a “first-rate intelligence” is meant to deny his own intelligence that designation; as he saw it, the pressure of the contradiction had made him effectively cease to exist, like Frege’s set theory or a computer downed by Kirkian paradox. (The Housemartins, elsewhere in “Sitting on a Fence,” more or less summarize “The Crack-Up”: “I lied to myself right from the start /
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