Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Absolutely.”

“That’s certainly an idea.”

“Now you’ve a clean start—a 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 mediævalist,” 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.”