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

“There’s only one lesson to be learned from life, anyway,” interrupted Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement.

“What’s that?” demanded Maury sharply.

“That there’s no lesson to be learned from life.”

After a short silence Maury said:

“Young Gloria, the beautiful and merciless lady, first looked at the world with the fundamental sophistication I have struggled to attain, that Anthony never will attain, that Dick will never fully understand.”

There was a disgusted groan from the apple-barrel. Anthony, grown accustomed to the dark, could see plainly the flash of Richard Caramel’s yellow eye and the look of resentment on his face as he cried:

“You’re crazy! By your own statement I should have attained some experience by trying.”

“Trying what?” cried Maury fiercely. “Trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge toward truth? Sitting day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas? Struggling in a laboratory through weary years for one iota of relative truth in a mass of wheels or a test tube⁠—”

“Have you?”

Maury paused, and in his answer, when it came, there was a measure of weariness, a bitter overnote that lingered for a moment in those three minds before it floated up and off like a bubble bound for the moon.

“Not I,” he said softly. “I was born tired⁠—but with the quality of mother wit, the gift of women like Gloria⁠—to that, for all my talking and listening, my waiting in vain for the eternal generality that seems to lie just beyond every argument and every speculation, to that I have added not one jot.”

In the distance a deep sound that had been audible for some moments identified itself by a plaintive mooing like that of a gigantic cow and by the pearly spot of a headlight apparent half a mile away. It was a steam-driven train this time, rumbling and groaning, and as it tumbled by with a monstrous complaint it sent a shower of sparks and cinders over the platform.

“Not one jot!” Again Maury’s voice dropped down to them as from a great height. “What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe⁠—why, intelligence never built a steam engine! Circumstances built a steam engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.

“I could quote you the philosophy of the hour⁠—but, for all we know, fifty years may see a complete reversal of this abnegation that’s absorbing the intellectuals today, the triumph of Christ over Anatole France⁠—” He hesitated, and then added: “But all I know⁠—the tremendous importance of myself to me, and the necessity of acknowledging that importance to myself⁠—these things the wise and lovely Gloria was born knowing, these things and the painful futility of trying to know anything else.

“Well, I started to tell you of my education, didn’t I? But I learned nothing, you see, very little even about myself. And if I had I should die with my lips shut and the guard on my fountain pen⁠—as the wisest men have done since⁠—oh, since the failure of a certain matter⁠—a strange matter, by the way. It concerned some sceptics who thought they were farsighted, just as you and I. Let me tell you about them by way of an evening prayer before you all drop off to sleep.

“Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief⁠—that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:

“ ‘Let’s join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let’s persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We’ll include all the most preposterous old wives’ tales now current. We’ll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he’ll become a byword for laughter the world over⁠—and we’ll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he’ll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there’ll be no more nonsense in the world.

“ ‘Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.’

“So the men did, and they died.

“But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.”

When he concluded there was no comment. Some damp languor sleeping on the air of night seemed to have bewitched them all.

“As I said, I started on the story of my education. But my highballs are dead and the night’s almost over, and soon there’ll be an awful jabbering going on everywhere, in the trees and the houses, and the two little stores over there behind the station, and there’ll be