The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me. I believed that because a man cried out ‘My God!’ when a safe fell on him, it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast. Then I went to school. For fourteen years half a hundred earnest men pointed to ancient flintlocks and cried to me: ‘There’s the real thing. These new rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.’ They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them ‘clever.’

“And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets, listening⁠—to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first bass and his fine range, to Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and Marlow, bassos profundo. I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron declaiming, and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I learned a little of beauty⁠—enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth⁠—and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.⁠ ⁠…

“Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.

“The transition was subtle⁠—the thing had lain in wait for me for some time. It has its insidious, seemingly innocuous trap for everyone. With me? No⁠—I didn’t try to seduce the janitor’s wife⁠—nor did I run through the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility. It is never quite passion that does the business⁠—it is the dress that passion wears. I became bored⁠—that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts. Beauty was behind me, do you understand?⁠—I was grown.” He paused. “End of school and college period. Opening of Part Two.”

Three quietly active points of light showed the location of his listeners. Gloria was now half sitting, half lying, in Anthony’s lap. His arm was around her so tightly that she could hear the beating of his heart. Richard Caramel, perched on the apple-barrel, from time to time stirred and gave off a faint grunt.

“I grew up then, into this land of jazz, and fell immediately into a state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts. But, with a mistaken faith in intelligence, I plodded on. I read Smith, who laughed at charity and insisted that the sneer was the highest form of self-expression⁠—but Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light. I read Jones, who neatly disposed of individualism⁠—and behold! Jones was still in my way. I did not think⁠—I was a battleground for the thoughts of many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries over which the great powers surge back and forth.

“I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life⁠—and of being beaten and bewildered just the same.

“But after a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough. Here! I said, Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you⁠—it’s a wall that an active you runs up against. So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable scepticism and decided that my education was complete. But it was too late. Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

He broke off to give emphasis to his last observation⁠—after a moment he yawned and resumed.

“I suppose that the beginning of the second phase of my education was a ghastly dissatisfaction at being used in spite of myself for some inscrutable purpose of whose ultimate goal I was unaware⁠—if, indeed, there was an ultimate goal. It was a difficult choice. The schoolmistress seemed to be saying, ‘We’re going to play football and nothing but football. If you don’t want to play football you can’t play at all⁠—’

“What was I to do⁠—the playtime was so short!

“You see, I felt that we were even denied what consolation there might have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees. Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, say, a gray autumn day before a fire?⁠—I don’t think I did that. I was a great deal too warm for that, and too alive.

“For it seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature⁠—nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident had brought us to where we could fly in her face. She had invented ways to rid the race of the inferior and thus give the remainder strength to fill her higher⁠—or, let us say, her more amusing⁠—though still unconscious and accidental intentions. And, actuated by the highest gifts of the enlightenment, we were seeking to circumvent her. In this republic I saw the black beginning to mingle with the white⁠—in Europe there was taking place an economic catastrophe to save three or four diseased and wretchedly governed races from the one mastery that might organize them for material prosperity.

“We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper⁠—and presently the breed of the leper is the salt of the earth. If anyone can find any