… he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.
portrait of a generation, lost and hungry
a tale by f. scott fitzgerald
… he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.
… you’re just going around in a circle. If you want to be prominent, get out and try something; if you don’t, just take it easy.
He knew that where now the spirit of spires and towers made him dreamily acquiescent, it would then overawe him. Where now he realised only his own inconsequence, effort would make him aware of his own impotency and insufficiency.
But, Amory, honestly, what makes me the angriest isn’t the fact that you won’t be the chairman of the Prince and on the Senior Council, but just that you didn’t get down and pass that exam.
Not me, I’m mad at the concrete thing. My own idleness was quite in accord with my system, but the luck broke.
Your system broke, you mean... Well, what are you going to do? Get a better one quick, or just bum around for two more years as a has-been?
I don't know yet...I am afraid I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will arrive without struggle.
Don’t let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself.
… beware of trying to classify people too definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet are merely packing a jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with the world.
You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth but do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to criticise don’t blame yourself too much.
You sink to the third hell of depression when you think you’ve been slighted. In fact, you haven’t much self-respect…
The reason you have so little 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.
You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination… You never decide at first while the merits of going or staying are fairly clear in your mind.
You let your imagination shinny on the side of your desires for a few hours, and then you decide. Naturally your imagination, after a little freedom, thinks up a million reasons why you should stay, so your decision when it comes isn’t true.
There’s your big mistake. This has nothing to do with will-power; that’s a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgement - the judgement to decide at once when you know your imagination will play you false, given half a chance.
Youth is like having a big plate of candy.
Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy.
They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.
He was still afraid - not physically afraid any more, but afraid of people and prejudice and misery and monotony.
Yet, deep in his bitter heart, he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly: “No. Genius!”
That was one manifestation of fear, that voice which whispered that he could not be both great and good, that genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity.
Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that tomorrow and the thousand days after he would swell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor.
Weak things were often beautiful, weak things were never good.
And in this new loneliness of his that had been selected for what greatness he might achieve, beauty must be relative or, itself a harmony, it would make only a discord.
His ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth - yet the water of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.
He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. “I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”