This Side of Paradise F. Scott Fitzgerald (mini ebook reader .txt) đ
- Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
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There was a brisk knock at the door, and Burne himself came in. âHello, Amoryâ âhello, Tom.â
Amory rose.
âEvening, Burne. Donât mind if I seem to rush; Iâm going to Renwickâs.â
Burne turned to him quickly.
âYou probably know what I want to talk to Tom about, and it isnât a bit private. I wish youâd stay.â
âIâd be glad to.â Amory sat down again, and as Burne perched on a table and launched into argument with Tom, he looked at this revolutionary more carefully than he ever had before. Broad-browed and strong-chinned, with a fineness in the honest gray eyes that were like Kerryâs, Burne was a man who gave an immediate impression of bigness and securityâ âstubborn, that was evident, but his stubbornness wore no stolidity, and when he had talked for five minutes Amory knew that this keen enthusiasm had in it no quality of dilettantism.
The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the admiration he had had for Humbird. This time it began as purely a mental interest. With other men of whom he had thought as primarily first-class, he had been attracted first by their personalities, and in Burne he missed that immediate magnetism to which he usually swore allegiance. But that night Amory was struck by Burneâs intense earnestness, a quality he was accustomed to associate only with the dread stupidity, and by the great enthusiasm that struck dead chords in his heart. Burne stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting towardâ âand it was almost time that land was in sight. Tom and Amory and Alec had reached an impasse; never did they seem to have new experiences in common, for Tom and Alec had been as blindly busy with their committees and boards as Amory had been blindly idling, and the things they had for dissectionâ âcollege, contemporary personality and the likeâ âthey had hashed and rehashed for many a frugal conversational meal.
That night they discussed the clubs until twelve, and, in the main, they agreed with Burne. To the roommates it did not seem such a vital subject as it had in the two years before, but the logic of Burneâs objections to the social system dovetailed so completely with everything they had thought, that they questioned rather than argued, and envied the sanity that enabled this man to stand out so against all traditions.
Then Amory branched off and found that Burne was deep in other things as well. Economics had interested him and he was turning socialist. Pacifism played in the back of his mind, and he read the Masses and Lyoff Tolstoy faithfully.
âHow about religion?â Amory asked him.
âDonât know. Iâm in a muddle about a lot of thingsâ âIâve just discovered that Iâve a mind, and Iâm starting to read.â
âRead what?â
âEverything. I have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things to make me think. Iâm reading the four gospels now, and the Varieties of Religious Experience.â
âWhat chiefly started you?â
âWells, I guess, and Tolstoy, and a man named Edward Carpenter. Iâve been reading for over a year nowâ âon a few lines, on what I consider the essential lines.â
âPoetry?â
âWell, frankly, not what you call poetry, or for your reasonsâ âyou two write, of course, and look at things differently. Whitman is the man that attracts me.â
âWhitman?â
âYes; heâs a definite ethical force.â
âWell, Iâm ashamed to say that Iâm a blank on the subject of Whitman. How about you, Tom?â
Tom nodded sheepishly.
âWell,â continued Burne, âyou may strike a few poems that are tiresome, but I mean the mass of his work. Heâs tremendousâ âlike Tolstoy. They both look things in the face, and, somehow, different as they are, stand for somewhat the same things.â
âYou have me stumped, Burne,â Amory admitted. âIâve read Anna KarĂ©nina and the Kreutzer Sonata of course, but Tolstoy is mostly in the original Russian as far as Iâm concerned.â
âHeâs the greatest man in hundreds of years,â cried Burne enthusiastically. âDid you ever see a picture of that shaggy old head of his?â
They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and when Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow with ideas and a sense of shock that someone else had discovered the path he might have followed. Burne Holiday was so evidently developingâ âand Amory had considered that he was doing the same. He had fallen into a deep cynicism over what had crossed his path, plotted the imperfectability of man and read Shaw and Chesterton enough to keep his mind from the edges of decadenceâ ânow suddenly all his mental processes of the last year and a half seemed stale and futileâ âa petty consummation of himselfâ ââ ⊠and like a sombre background lay that incident of the spring before, that filled half his nights with a dreary terror and made him unable to pray. He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedralsâ âa Catholicism which Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or sacraments or sacrifice.
He could not sleep, so he turned on his reading-lamp and, taking down the Kreutzer Sonata, searched it carefully for the germs of Burneâs enthusiasm. Being Burne was suddenly so much realler than being clever. Yet he sighedâ ââ ⊠here were other possible clay feet.
He thought back through two years, of Burne as a hurried, nervous freshman, quite submerged in his brotherâs personality. Then he remembered an incident of sophomore year, in which Burne had been suspected of the leading role.
Dean Hollister had been heard by a large group arguing with a taxi-driver, who had driven him from the junction. In the course of the altercation the dean remarked that he âmight as well buy the taxicab.â He paid and walked off, but next morning he entered his private office to find the taxicab itself in the space
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