This Side of Paradise Part 28

"This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.

"It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

"There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend-all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness."

The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of s.e.x. He was beginning to identify evil with the strong phallic worship in Brooke and the early Wells. Inseparably linked with evil was beauty-beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor's voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously through life like superimposed waterfalls, half rhythm, half darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward it longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most of all the beauty of women.

After all, it had too many a.s.sociations with license and indulgence. Weak things were often beautiful, weak things were never good. And in this new loneness 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.

In a sense this gradual renunciation of beauty was the second step after his disillusion had been made complete. He felt that he was leaving behind him his chance of being a certain type of artist. It seemed so much more important to be a certain sort of man.

His mind turned a corner suddenly and he found himself thinking of the Catholic Church. The idea was strong in him that there was a certain intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was necessary, and religion to Amory meant the Church of Rome. Quite conceivably it was an empty ritual but it was seemingly the only a.s.similative, traditionary bulwark against the decay of morals. Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense some one must cry: "Thou shalt not!" Yet any acceptance was, for the present, impossible. He wanted time and the absence of ulterior pressure. He wanted to keep the tree without ornaments, realize fully the direction and momentum of this new start.

The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o'clock to the golden beauty of four. Afterward he walked through the dull ache of a setting sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding and at twilight he came to a graveyard. There was a dusky, dreamy smell of flowers and the ghost of a new moon in the sky and shadows everywhere. On an impulse he considered trying to open the door of a rusty iron vault built into the side of a hill; a vault washed clean and covered with late-blooming, weepy watery-blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes, sticky to the touch with a sickening odor.

Amory wanted to feel "William Dayfield, 1864."

He wondered that graves ever made people consider life in vain. Somehow he could find nothing hopeless in having lived. All the broken columns and clasped hands and doves and angels meant romances. He fancied that in a hundred years he would like having young people speculate as to whether his eyes were brown or blue, and he hoped quite pa.s.sionately that his grave would have about it an air of many, many years ago. It seemed strange that out of a row of Union soldiers two or three made him think of dead loves and dead lovers, when they were exactly like the rest, even to the yellowish moss.

Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light-and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all G.o.ds dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken....

Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself-art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria-he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights....

There was no G.o.d in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth-yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But-oh, Rosalind! Rosalind!...

"It's all a poor subst.i.tute at best," he said sadly.

And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had pa.s.sed....

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

"I know myself," he cried, "but that is all."

Appendix: Production notes for eBook edition 11

The primary feature of edition 11 is restoration of em-dashes which are missing from edition 10. (My favorite instance is "I won't belong" rather than "I won't be-long".) Characters which are 8-bit in the printed text were misrepresented in edition 10. Edition 10 had some end-of-paragraph problems. A handful of other minor errors are corrected.

Two volumes served as reference for edition 11: a 1960 reprint, and an undated reprint produced sometime after 1948. There are a number of differences between the volumes. Evidence suggests that the 1960 reprint has been somewhat "modernized", and that the undated reprint is a better match for the original 1920 printing. Therefore, when the volumes differ, edition 11 more closely follows the undated reprint.

In edition 11, underscores are used to denote words and phrases italicized for emphasis.

There is a section of text in book 2, chapter 3, beginning with "When Vanity kissed Vanity," which is referred to as "poetry" but is formatted as prose.

I considered, but decided against introducing an 8-bit version of edition 11, in large part because the bulk of the 8-bit usage (as found in the 1960 reprint) consists of words commonly used in their 7-bit form: Aeschylus blase cafe debut debutante elan elite Encyclopaedia matinee minutiae paean regime soupcon unaesthetic Less-commonly-used 8-bit word forms in this book include: anaemic bleme coeur manoeuvered mediaevalist tete-a-tete and the name "Borge".