This Side of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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...