my side of paradise
you find good things when you re-read books. parts you remember, but at different points in each persons life, you discover something new about it, something strikes you in a certain way, something makes you identify.
so i am re-reading one of my favorites. THIS SIDE OF PARADISE - F. SCOTT FITZGERALD . if you havent read it, i reccomend it highly. if you have read it, i recently decided that im as bad a worrier as amory's mom! i often wonder if i were her age, in her time, if i would be like her. but MOST recently, i read & re-read the following sub chapter. its right down my alley. i dont think its wrong or uppity of me to consider myself a
FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE TERM "PERSONAGE"
Monsignor Darcy invited Amory up to the Stuart palace on the Hudson for a week at Christmas, and they had enormous conversations around the open fire. Monsignor was growing a trifle stouter and his personality had expanded even with that, and Amory felt both rest and security in sinking into a squat, cushioned chair and joining him in the middle-aged sanity of a cigar.
"I've felt like leaving college, Monsignor." "Why?"
"All my career's gone up in smoke; you think it's petty and all that, but"
"Not at all petty. I think it's most important. I want to hear the whole thing. Everything you've been doing since I saw you last."
Amory talked; he went thoroughly into the destruction of his egotistic highways, and in a half-hour the listless quality had left his voice.
"What would you do if you left college?" asked Monsignor. "Don't know. I'd like to travel, but of course this tiresome war prevents that. Anyways, mother would hate not having me graduate. I'm just at sea. Kerry Holiday wants me to go over with him and join the Lafayette Esquadrille." "You know you wouldn't like to go." "Sometimes I wouldto-night I'd go in a second." "Well, you'd have to be very much more tired of life than I think you are. I know you."
"I'm afraid you do," agreed Amory reluctantly. "It just seemed an easy way out of everythingwhen I think of another useless, draggy year."
"Yes, I know; but to tell you the truth, I'm not worried about you; you seem to me to be progressing perfectly naturally." "No," Amory objected. "I've lost half my personality in a year." "Not a bit of it!" scoffed Monsignor. "You've lost a great amount of vanity and that's all."
"Lordy! I feel, anyway, as if I'd gone through another fifth form at St. Regis's."
"No." Monsignor shook his head. "That was a misfortune; this has been a good thing. Whatever worth while comes to you, won't be through the channels you were searching last year." "What could be more unprofitable than my present lack of pep?" "Perhaps in itself ... but you're developing. This has given you time to think and you're casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and the superman and all. People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concernedwe'd just make asses of ourselves." "But, Monsignor, I can't do the next thing." "Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it myself. I can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe on that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall."
"Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I should do."
"We have to do it because we're not personalities, but personages."
"That's a good linewhat do you mean?" "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 onI'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 hungglittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them."
"And several of my most glittering possessions had fallen off when I needed them." Amory continued the simile eagerly. "Yes, that's it; when you feel that your garnered prestige and talents and all that are hung out, you need never bother about anybody; you can cope with them without difficulty." "But, on the other hand, if I haven't my possessions, I'm helpless!"
"Absolutely."
"That's certainly an idea."
"Now you've a clean starta start Kerry or Sloane can constitutionally never have. You brushed three or four ornaments down, and, in a fit of pique, knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting the better. But remember, do the next thing!"
"How clear you can make things!" So they talked, often about themselves, sometimes of philosophy and religion, and life as respectively a game or a mystery. The priest seemed to guess Amory's thoughts before they were clear in his own head, so closely related were their minds in form and groove.
"Why do I make lists?" Amory asked him one night. "Lists of all sorts of things?"
"Because you're a medifvalist," Monsignor answered. "We both are. It's the passion for classifying and finding a type." "It's a desire to get something definite." "It's the nucleus of scholastic philosophy." "I was beginning to think I was growing eccentric till I came up here. It was a pose, I guess." "Don't worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of all. Pose"
"Yes?"
"But do the next thing."
i dont think thats bad advice, just do the next thing.
so i am re-reading one of my favorites. THIS SIDE OF PARADISE - F. SCOTT FITZGERALD . if you havent read it, i reccomend it highly. if you have read it, i recently decided that im as bad a worrier as amory's mom! i often wonder if i were her age, in her time, if i would be like her. but MOST recently, i read & re-read the following sub chapter. its right down my alley. i dont think its wrong or uppity of me to consider myself a
FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE TERM "PERSONAGE"
Monsignor Darcy invited Amory up to the Stuart palace on the Hudson for a week at Christmas, and they had enormous conversations around the open fire. Monsignor was growing a trifle stouter and his personality had expanded even with that, and Amory felt both rest and security in sinking into a squat, cushioned chair and joining him in the middle-aged sanity of a cigar.
"I've felt like leaving college, Monsignor." "Why?"
"All my career's gone up in smoke; you think it's petty and all that, but"
"Not at all petty. I think it's most important. I want to hear the whole thing. Everything you've been doing since I saw you last."
Amory talked; he went thoroughly into the destruction of his egotistic highways, and in a half-hour the listless quality had left his voice.
"What would you do if you left college?" asked Monsignor. "Don't know. I'd like to travel, but of course this tiresome war prevents that. Anyways, mother would hate not having me graduate. I'm just at sea. Kerry Holiday wants me to go over with him and join the Lafayette Esquadrille." "You know you wouldn't like to go." "Sometimes I wouldto-night I'd go in a second." "Well, you'd have to be very much more tired of life than I think you are. I know you."
"I'm afraid you do," agreed Amory reluctantly. "It just seemed an easy way out of everythingwhen I think of another useless, draggy year."
"Yes, I know; but to tell you the truth, I'm not worried about you; you seem to me to be progressing perfectly naturally." "No," Amory objected. "I've lost half my personality in a year." "Not a bit of it!" scoffed Monsignor. "You've lost a great amount of vanity and that's all."
"Lordy! I feel, anyway, as if I'd gone through another fifth form at St. Regis's."
"No." Monsignor shook his head. "That was a misfortune; this has been a good thing. Whatever worth while comes to you, won't be through the channels you were searching last year." "What could be more unprofitable than my present lack of pep?" "Perhaps in itself ... but you're developing. This has given you time to think and you're casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and the superman and all. People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concernedwe'd just make asses of ourselves." "But, Monsignor, I can't do the next thing." "Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it myself. I can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe on that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall."
"Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I should do."
"We have to do it because we're not personalities, but personages."
"That's a good linewhat do you mean?" "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 onI'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 hungglittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them."
"And several of my most glittering possessions had fallen off when I needed them." Amory continued the simile eagerly. "Yes, that's it; when you feel that your garnered prestige and talents and all that are hung out, you need never bother about anybody; you can cope with them without difficulty." "But, on the other hand, if I haven't my possessions, I'm helpless!"
"Absolutely."
"That's certainly an idea."
"Now you've a clean starta start Kerry or Sloane can constitutionally never have. You brushed three or four ornaments down, and, in a fit of pique, knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting the better. But remember, do the next thing!"
"How clear you can make things!" So they talked, often about themselves, sometimes of philosophy and religion, and life as respectively a game or a mystery. The priest seemed to guess Amory's thoughts before they were clear in his own head, so closely related were their minds in form and groove.
"Why do I make lists?" Amory asked him one night. "Lists of all sorts of things?"
"Because you're a medifvalist," Monsignor answered. "We both are. It's the passion for classifying and finding a type." "It's a desire to get something definite." "It's the nucleus of scholastic philosophy." "I was beginning to think I was growing eccentric till I came up here. It was a pose, I guess." "Don't worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of all. Pose"
"Yes?"
"But do the next thing."
i dont think thats bad advice, just do the next thing.