Tender Is the Night

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald makes it clear that the most damning forces of dissolution in our lives come from within. He suggests that the very liberties that secure our idlest hours can dissociate us from life by distancing us from meaningful experiences, weakening our emotional bonds, and undermining our sense of self.

Quote from the introduction

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.

By not sparing Rosemary she had made her hard—by not sparing her own labor and devotion she had cultivated an idealism in Rosemary, which at present was directed toward herself and saw the world through her eyes.

He seemed kind and charming—his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her, unroll an endless succession of magnificent possibilities.

They were meeting for the first time. Brady was quick and strenuous. As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.

Misogyny and unequal power, yet she is flattered with her manipulative power or his attention?

Now—she was thinking—I’ve earned a time alone with him. He must know that because his laws are like the laws Mother taught me.

It was a limpid black night, hung as in a basket from a single dull star.

“You were brought up to work—not especially to marry. Now you’ve found your first nut to crack and it’s a good nut—go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him—whatever happens it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl.”

Their point of resemblance to each other, and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world—they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them.

“The silver cord is cut and the golden bowl is broken and all that, but an old romantic like me can’t do anything about it.”

Ecclesiastes 12:6.representing the connection between body and soul or the life force itself,the frailty of life.

Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick’s telling her which things were ludicrous and which things were sad. But most of all she wanted him to know how she loved him, now that the fact was upsetting everything, now that she was walking over the battlefield in a thrilling dream.

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy—one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

“Not only are you beautiful but you are somehow on the grand scale.

She did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart; at the moment when she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret.

Perfection.

The voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief against the arm growing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans than if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mixture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale. As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.