Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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Amory stopped. He began for the first time in his life to have a strong distrust of all generalities and epigrams. They were too easy, too dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: Benson and Chesterton had popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had sugar-coated Nietzsche and Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions of dead genius through some one else’s clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

Life was a damned muddle … a football game with every one off-side and the referee gotten rid of—every one claiming the referee would have been on his side….

Progress was a labyrinth … people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it … the invisible king—the élan vital—the principle of evolution … writing a book, starting a war, founding a school….

Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all inquiries with himself. He was his own best example—sitting in the rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and his own temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved to help in building up the living consciousness of the race.