This Side of Paradise F. Scott Fitzgerald (mini ebook reader .txt) đ
- Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
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âWhatâs your difficulty? Lost your job?â
âNot exactly, butâ âwell, call it that.â
âWhat was it?â
âWriting copy for an advertising agency.â
âLots of money in advertising.â
Amory smiled discreetly.
âOh, Iâll admit thereâs money in it eventually. Talent doesnât starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days. Artists draw your magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out ragtime for your theatres. By the great commercializing of printing youâve found a harmless, polite occupation for every genius who might have carved his own niche. But beware the artist whoâs an intellectual also. The artist who doesnât fitâ âthe Rousseau, the Tolstoy, the Samuel Butler, the Amory Blaineâ ââ
âWhoâs he?â demanded the little man suspiciously.
âWell,â said Amory, âheâs aâ âheâs an intellectual personage not very well known at present.â
The little man laughed his conscientious laugh, and stopped rather suddenly as Amoryâs burning eyes turned on him.
âWhat are you laughing at?â
âThese intellectual peopleâ ââ
âDo you know what it means?â
The little manâs eyes twitched nervously.
âWhy, it usually meansâ ââ
âIt always means brainy and well-educated,â interrupted Amory. âIt means having an active knowledge of the raceâs experience.â Amory decided to be very rude. He turned to the big man. âThe young man,â he indicated the secretary with his thumb, and said young man as one says bellboy, with no implication of youth, âhas the usual muddled connotation of all popular words.â
âYou object to the fact that capital controls printing?â said the big man, fixing him with his goggles.
âYesâ âand I object to doing their mental work for them. It seemed to me that the root of all the business I saw around me consisted in overworking and underpaying a bunch of dubs who submitted to it.â
âHere now,â said the big man, âyouâll have to admit that the laboring man is certainly highly paidâ âfive and six hour daysâ âitâs ridiculous. You canât buy an honest dayâs work from a man in the trades-unions.â
âYouâve brought it on yourselves,â insisted Amory. âYou people never make concessions until theyâre wrung out of you.â
âWhat people?â
âYour class; the class I belonged to until recently; those who by inheritance or industry or brains or dishonesty have become the moneyed class.â
âDo you imagine that if that road-mender over there had the money heâd be any more willing to give it up?â
âNo, but whatâs that got to do with it?â
The older man considered.
âNo, Iâll admit it hasnât. It rather sounds as if it had though.â
âIn fact,â continued Amory, âheâd be worse. The lower classes are narrower, less pleasant and personally more selfishâ âcertainly more stupid. But all that has nothing to do with the question.â
âJust exactly what is the question?â
Here Amory had to pause to consider exactly what the question was.
Amory Coins a Phrase
âWhen life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education,â began Amory slowly, âthat is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned. He may be unselfish, kindhearted, even just in his own way, but his first job is to provide and to hold fast. His wife shoos him on, from ten thousand a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill that hasnât any windows. Heâs done! Lifeâs got him! Heâs no help! Heâs a spiritually married man.â
Amory paused and decided that it wasnât such a bad phrase.
âSome men,â he continued, âescape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe theyâve hit a sentence or two in a âdangerous bookâ that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, theyâre the congressmen you canât bribe, the Presidents who arenât politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who arenât just popular grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.â
âHeâs the natural radical?â
âYes,â said Amory. âHe may vary from the disillusioned critic like old Thornton Hancock, all the way to Trotsky. Now this spiritually unmarried man hasnât direct power, for unfortunately the spiritually married man, as a byproduct of his money chase, has garnered in the great newspaper, the popular magazine, the influential weeklyâ âso that Mrs. Newspaper, Mrs. Magazine, Mrs. Weekly can have a better limousine than those oil people across the street or those cement people âround the corner.â
âWhy not?â
âIt makes wealthy men the keepers of the worldâs intellectual conscience and, of course, a man who has money under one set of social institutions quite naturally canât risk his familyâs happiness by letting the clamor for another appear in his newspaper.â
âBut it appears,â said the big man.
âWhere?â âin the discredited mediums. Rotten cheap-papered weeklies.â
âAll rightâ âgo on.â
âWell, my first point is that through a mixture of conditions of which the family is the first, there are these two sorts of brains. One sort takes human nature as it finds it, uses its timidity, its weakness, and its strength for its own ends. Opposed is the man who, being spiritually unmarried, continually seeks for new systems that will control or counteract human nature. His problem is harder. It is not life thatâs complicated, itâs the struggle to guide and control life. That is his struggle. He is a part of progressâ âthe spiritually married man is not.â
The big man produced three big cigars, and proffered them on his huge palm. The little man took one, Amory shook his head and reached for a cigarette.
âGo on talking,â said the big man. âIâve been wanting to hear one of you fellows.â
Going Faster
âModern life,â began Amory again, âchanges no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has beforeâ âpopulations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, andâ âweâre dawdling along. My idea is that weâve got to go very much faster.â He slightly emphasized the last words and the chauffeur unconsciously increased the speed of the car. Amory and the big man laughed; the little man laughed, too, after a pause.
âEvery child,â said Amory, âshould have an equal start. If his father can endow him with a good physique and his mother with some common
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