This Side of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory.

I think of Princeton as being lazy and good- looking and aristocratic—you know, like a spring day. Harvard seems sort of indoors—" "And Yale is November, crisp and energetic," finished Monsignor. "That's it."

He went all wrong at the start, was generally considered both conceited and arrogant, and universally detested. He played football intensely, alternating a reckless brilliancy with a tendency to keep himself as safe from hazard as decency would permit. In a wild panic he backed out of a fight with a boy his own size, to a chorus of scorn, and a week later, in desperation, picked a battle with another boy very much bigger, from which he emerged badly beaten, but rather proud of himself.

"I'd be proud to take her home and introduce her to my people," continued Paskert. Amory was distinctly impressed. He wished he had said it instead of Paskert. It sounded so mature.

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.

"I let people impose on me here and don't get anything out of it. I'm the prey of my friends, damn it—do their lessons, get 'em out of trouble, pay 'em stupid summer visits, and always entertain their kid sisters; keep my temper when they get selfish and then they think they pay me back by voting for me and telling me I'm the 'big man' of St. Regis's. I want to get where everybody does their own work and I can tell people where to go. I'm tired of being nice to every poor fish in school."

"Why decide?" suggested Kerry. "Better drift, like me. I'm going to sail into prominence on Burne's coat-tails." "I can't drift—I want to be interested. I want to pull strings, even for somebody else, or be Princetonian chairman or Triangle president. I want to be admired, Kerry."

Isabelle had been for some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions…

Boys who passed the door looked in enviously—girls who passed only laughed and frowned and grew wise within themselves.

"Oh, winter's rains and ruins are over, And all the seasons of snows and sins; The days dividing lover and lover, The light that loses, the night that wins; And time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and cover, Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

And so on in an eternal monotone that seemed to both of them infinitely charming, infinitely new.

I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry."

Then tragedy's emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the edge of June.

he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed by the haze of his own youth.

"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.

Now, Amory, I don't know whether that is a fad at Princeton too, but I don't want you to be so foolish. It not only inclines a young man to pneumonia and infantile paralysis,

Whatever worth while comes to you, won't be through the channels you were searching last year."

"A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I've seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them."

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.

"You're really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of depression when you think you've been slighted. In fact, you haven't much self-respect."

But I'm not through; the reason you have so little real self-confidence, even though you gravely announce to the occasional philistine that you think you're a genius, is that you've attributed all sorts of atrocious faults to yourself and are trying to live up to them.

"There you go—running through your catalogue of emotions in five seconds."

ROSALIND: (With a faint roguishness) Don't look so consciously suffering. AMORY: What power we have of hurting each other!

The first real unselfishness I've ever felt in my life. And I can't see it fade out in a colorless atmosphere! AMORY: It won't—it won't! ROSALIND: I'd rather keep it as a beautiful memory—tucked away in my heart.

Yes, women can do that—but not men. I'd remember always, not the beauty of it while it lasted, but just the bitterness, the long bitterness.

(There is a difference somehow in the quality of their suffering.)

Here they had sat and dreamed: that tray she had so often filled with matches for him; that shade that they had discreetly lowered one long Sunday afternoon. Misty-eyed she stands and remembers; she speaks aloud.) Oh, Amory, what have I done to you? (And deep under the aching sadness that will pass in time, Rosalind feels that she has lost something, she knows not what, she knows not why.)

He looked at it unmoved. After the vivid mental pictures of her that were his portion at present, the portrait was curiously unreal.

He had taken the most violent, if the weakest, method to shield himself from the stabs of memory,

War used to be the most individualistic pursuit of man, and yet the popular heroes of the war had neither authority nor responsibility:

"I am," agreed Amory reluctantly. "Yet when I see a happy family it makes me sick at my stomach—" "Happy families try to make people feel that way," said Tom cynically.

Reminds me a lot of the opening to Anna Karenina

"And I wish American novelists would give up trying to make business romantically interesting.

I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy;

The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't."

sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power—to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk.

There were so many places where one might deteriorate pleasantly: Port Said, Shanghai, parts of Turkestan, Constantinople, the South Seas— all lands of sad, haunting music and many odors, where lust could be a mode and expression of life, where the shades of night skies and sunsets would seem to reflect only moods of passion: the colors of lips and poppies.

Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own funeral. It was magnificently Catholic and liturgical.