This Side of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes. —Oscar Wilde

height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments,

an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t understand her.

All in all Beatrice O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

don’t like girls in the daytime,” he said shortly, and then, thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: “But I like you.” He cleared his throat. “I like you first and second and third.” Myra’s eyes became dreamy. What a story this would make to tell Marylyn! Here on the couch with this wonderful-looking boy—the little fire—the sense that they were alone in the great building— Myra capitulated. The atmosphere was too appropriate. “I like you the first twenty-five,” she confessed, her voice trembling, “and Froggy Parker twenty-sixth.” Froggy had fallen twenty-five places in one hour. As yet he had not even noticed it. But Amory, being on the spot, leaned over quickly and kissed Myra’s cheek. He had never kissed a girl before, and he tasted his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new fruit. Then their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.

Here his condition was, perhaps, most dangerous. He granted himself personality, charm, magnetism, poise, the power of dominating all contemporary males, the gift of fascinating all women. Mentally.—Complete, unquestioned superiority.

Monsignor Darcy’s house was an ancient, rambling structure set on a hill overlooking the river, and there lived its owner, between his trips to all parts of the Roman Catholic world, rather like an exiled Stuart king waiting to be called to the rule of his land. Monsignor was forty-four then, and bustling—a trifle too stout for symmetry, with hair the color of spun gold, and a brilliant, enveloping personality. When he came into a room clad in his full purple regalia from thatch to toe, he resembled a Turner sunset, and attracted both admiration and attention. He had written two novels: one of them violently anti-Catholic, just before his conversion, and five years later another, in which he had attempted to turn all his clever jibes against Catholics into even cleverer innuendoes against Episcopalians. He was intensely ritualistic, startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate, and rather liked his neighbor.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

“Yes, and for the Southern Confederacy.”

Barf

when Doctor Dougall told him at the end of a heated conference that he could, if he wished, get the best marks in school. But Doctor Dougall was wrong. It was temperamentally impossible for Amory to get the best marks in school.

“I’m in a superior class. You are, too. We’re philosophers.” “I’m not.” “Sure you are. You’ve got a darn good head on you.” But Amory knew that nothing in the abstract, no theory or generality, ever moved Rahill until he stubbed his toe upon the concrete minutiae of it.

From the moment he realized this Amory resented social barriers as artificial distinctions made by the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and keep out the almost strong.

“We’re the damned middle class, that’s what!” he complained to Kerry one day as he lay stretched out on the sofa, consuming a family of Fatimas with contemplative precision. “Well, why not? We came to Princeton so we could feel that way toward the small colleges—have it on ’em, more self-confidence, dress better, cut a swathe—” “Oh, it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted Amory. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them.” “But just now, Amory, you’re only a sweaty bourgeois.”

He had rather a young face, the ingenuousness of which was marred by the penetrating green eyes, fringed with long dark eyelashes. He lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often accompanies beauty in men or women;

She had been sixteen years old for six months.

Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived.

how he could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and contour.

Amory usually liked men individually, yet feared them in crowds unless the crowd was around him. He wondered how much each one contributed to the party, for there was somewhat of a spiritual tax levied.

your eyes were opened to the mean scrambling quality of people,

They rode into Princeton as the sun was making colored maps of the sky behind the graduate school, and hurried to the refreshment of a shower that would have to serve in place of sleep. By noon the bright-costumed alumni crowded the streets with their bands and choruses, and in the tents there was great reunion under the orange-and-black banners that curled and strained in the wind. Amory looked long at one house which bore the legend “Sixty-nine.” There a few gray-haired men sat and talked quietly while the classes swept by in panorama of life.

It delighted Amory when Isabelle suggested that they leave for a while and drive around in her car. For a delicious hour that passed too soon they glided the silent roads about Princeton and talked from the surface of their hearts in shy excitement.

“Isabelle!” he cried, half involuntarily, and held out his arms. As in the story-books, she ran into them, and on that half-minute, as their lips first touched, rested the high point of vanity, the crest of his young egotism.

“You’re so funny.” “How?” “Well, I thought you had a lot of self-confidence and all that; remember you told me the other day that you could do anything you wanted, or get anything you wanted?” Amory flushed. He had told her a lot of things. “Yes.” “Well, you didn’t seem to feel so self-confident tonight. Maybe you’re just plain conceited.” “No, I’m not,” he hesitated. “At Princeton—” “Oh, you and Princeton! You’d think that was the world, the way you talk! Perhaps you can write better than anybody else on your old Princetonian; maybe the freshmen do think you’re important—” “You don’t understand—” “Yes, I do,” she interrupted. “I do, because you’re always talking about yourself and I used to like it; now I don’t.” “Have I tonight?”

as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concerned—we’d just make asses of ourselves.” “But, Monsignor, I can’t do the next thing.”

After Amory returned to college he received several letters from Monsignor which gave him more egotistic food for consumption. I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will arrive without struggle. Some nuances of character you will have to take for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in confessing them to others. You are unsentimental, almost incapable of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being proud. Don’t let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist in calling it; at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M. If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. Your last, that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful— so “highbrow” that I picture you living in an intellectual and emotional vacuum; and beware of trying to classify people too definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will sprin...

Chat gpt Father Darcy in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise" is often seen as a complex character. While some critics view him as a symbol of spiritual guidance and morality, others interpret him as a representation of hypocrisy and the struggle between faith and worldly desires. Overall, he tends to be regarded as a pivotal figure in the novel, influencing the protagonist's moral development and reflecting the themes of the story.

the whole divan that held the man was alive; alive like heat waves over asphalt, like wriggling worms. . . . “Come back! Come back!” Axia’s arm fell on his. “Amory, dear, you aren’t going, Amory!”

If the morning had been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of the past in an instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when the air on Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine.

He could feel the little hot veins on his forehead standing out, and his terror had hardened on him like plaster. He felt he was passing up again through the thin crust of horror, and now only could he distinguish the shadowy twilight he was leaving.

“You have me stumped, Burne,” Amory admitted. “I’ve read ‘Anna Karénina’ and the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ of course, but Tolstoi is mostly in the original Russian as far as I’m concerned.” “He’s the greatest man in hundreds of years,” cried Burne enthusiastically. “Did you ever see a picture of that shaggy old head of his?” They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and when Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow with ideas and a sense of shock that some one else had discovered the path he might have followed. Burne Holiday was so evidently developing—and Amory had considered that he was doing the same. He had fallen into a deep cynicism over what had crossed his path, plotted the imperfectability of man and read Shaw and Chesterton enough to keep his mind from the edges of decadence—now suddenly all his mental processes of the last year and a half seemed stale and futile—a petty consummation of himself . . . and like a sombre background lay that incident of the spring before, that filled half his nights with a dreary terror and made him unable to pray.

He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals—a Catholicism which Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or sacraments or sacrifice.

“It’s the whole thing,” he asserted. “It’s the one dividing line between good and evil. I’ve never met a man who led a rotten life and didn’t have a weak will.” “How about great criminals?” “They’re usually insane. If not, they’re weak. There is no such thing as a strong, sane criminal.” “Burne, I disagree with you altogether; how about the superman?” “Well?” “He’s evil, I think, yet he’s strong and sane.” “I’ve never met him. I’ll bet, though, that he’s stupid or insane.” “I’ve met him over and over and he’s neither. That’s why I think you’re wrong.” “I’m sure I’m not—and so I don’t believe in imprisonment except for the insane.” On this point Amory could not agree. It seemed to him that life and history were rife with the strong criminal, keen, but often self-deluding; in politics and business one found him and among the old statesmen and kings and generals; but Burne never agreed and their courses began to split on that point. Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class

Raskalnikov crime and punishment Dostoevsky

“Well, I can’t judge. A man, of course, has to go through a lot more, and I’ve been sheltered.”

Tennyson and all he stood for—for he took him as a representative of the Victorians. Victorians, Victorians, who never learned to weep Who sowed the bitter harvest that your children go to reap—

“This is the great protest against the superman,” said Amory. “I suppose so,” Alec agreed. “He’s absolutely irreconcilable with any Utopia. As long as he occurs, there’s trouble and all the latent evil that makes a crowd list and sway when he talks.” “And of course all that he is is a gifted man without a moral sense.” “That’s all. I think the worst thing to contemplate is this—it’s all happened before, how soon will it happen again? Fifty years after Waterloo Napoleon was as much a hero to English school children as Wellington. How do we know our grandchildren won’t idolize Von Hindenburg the same way?”

If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.”

They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees.

There are times when I think of the men out there as Roman legionaries, miles from their corrupt city, stemming back the hordes . . . hordes a little more menacing, after all, than the corrupt city . . . another blind blow at the race, furies that we passed with ovations years ago, over whose corpses we bleated triumphantly all through the Victorian era. . . .

Amory was finding it a great relief to be in this cool house on Riverside Drive, away from more condensed New York and the sense of people expelling great quantities of breath into a little space.

The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger—” “I don’t agree with you,” Tom interrupted. “There never were men placed in such egotistic positions since—oh, since the French Revolution.” Amory disagreed violently.

of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything

“How’ll I fit in?” he demanded. “What am I for? To propagate the race? According to the American novels we are led to believe that the ‘healthy American boy’ from nineteen to twenty-five is an entirely sexless animal. As a matter of fact, the healthier he is the less that’s true. The only alternative to letting it get you is some violent interest. Well, the war is over;

Good Lord! supposing she wasn’t beautiful—supposing she was forty and pedantic—heavens!

And the star dials pointed to morn At the end of the path a liquescent (says he) And nebulous lustre was born.

“I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.” (This was an ancient distinction of Amory’s.) “Epigrams. I’m going home,” she said sadly. “Let’s get off the haystack and walk to the cross-roads.” They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him help her down and motioning him away arrived in a graceful lump in the soft mud where she sat for an instant, laughing at herself. Then she jumped to her feet and slipped her hand into his, and they tiptoed across the fields, jumping and swinging from dry spot to dry spot. A transcendent delight seemed to sparkle in every pool of water, for the moon had risen and the storm had scurried away into western Maryland. When Eleanor’s arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her—she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes. His paganism soared that night and when she faded out like a gray ghost down the road, a deep singing came out of the fields and filled his way homeward. All night the summer moths flitted in and out of Amory’s window; all night large looming sounds swayed in mystic revery through the silver grai...

Often they swam and as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut his mind to all thoughts except those of hazy soap-bubble lands where the sun splattered through wind-drunk trees. How could any one possibly think or worry, or do anything except splash and dive and loll there on the edge of time while the flower months failed. Let the days move over—sadness and memory and pain recurred outside, and here, once more, before he went on to meet them he wanted to drift and be young.

“Light a match,” she whispered. “I want to see you.” Scratch! Flare! The night and the scarred trees were like scenery in a play, and to be there with Eleanor, shadowy and unreal, seemed somehow oddly familiar.

like clever men and good-looking men, and, of course, no one cares more for personality than I do. Oh, just one person in fifty has any glimmer of what sex is. I’m hipped on Freud and all that, but it’s rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupçon of jealousy.”

soup·çon noun a very small quantity of something. "a soupçon of mustard"

the truth is that sex is right in the middle of our purest abstractions, so close that it obscures vision. . . . I can kiss you now and will. . . .” He leaned toward her in his saddle, but she drew away. “I can’t—I can’t kiss you now—I’m more sensitive.” “You’re more stupid then,” he declared rather impatiently. “Intellect is no protection from sex any more than convention is. . . .” “What is?” she fired up. “The Catholic Church or the maxims of Confucius?” Amory looked up, rather taken aback. “That’s your panaecea, isn’t it?” she cried. “Oh, you’re just an old hypocrite, too. Thousands of scowling priests keeping the degenerate Italians and illiterate Irish repentant with gabble-gabble about the sixth and ninth commandments. It’s just all cloaks, sentiment and spiritual rouge and panaceas. I’ll tell you there is no God, not even a definite abstract goodness; so it’s all got to be worked out for the individual by the individual here in high white foreheads like mine, and you’re too much the prig to admit it.” She let go her reins and shook her little fists at the stars. “If there’s a God let him strike me—strike me!” “Talking about God again after the manner of atheists,” Amory said sharply. His materialism, always a thin cloak, was torn to shreds by Eleanor’s blasphemy. . . . She knew it and it angered him that she knew it. “And like most intellectuals who don’t find faith convenient,” he continued coldly, “like Napoleon and Oscar Wilde and the rest of your type, you’ll y...

New York seemed not so much awakening as turning over in its bed. Pallid men rushed by, pinching together their coat-collars; a great swarm of tired, magpie girls from a department-store crowded along with shrieks of strident laughter, three to an umbrella; a squad of marching policemen passed, already miraculously protected by oilskin capes.

It was some shame that women gave off at having men see them tired and poor—it was some disgust that men had for women who were tired and poor.

Epistemic