Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Damned gargoyle,” he muttered.

But he knew that the gargoyle had nothing to do with it.

Regularly every two weeks he had been drifting out Fifth Avenue. On crisp autumn afternoons the tops of the shining auto buses were particularly alluring. From the roofs of other passing buses a face barely seen, an interested glance, a flash of color assumed the proportion of an intrigue. He had left college five years before and the buses and the art gallery and a few books were his intellectual relaxation. Freshman year Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero-Worship,” in the hands of an impassioned young instructor, had interested him particularly. He had read practically nothing. He had neither the leisure to browse thoughtfully on much nor the education to cram thoughtfully on little, so his philosophy of life was molded of two elements: one the skeptical office philosophy of his associate, with a girl, a ten-thousand-dollar position, and a Utopian flat in some transfigured Bronx at the end of it; and the other, the three or four big ideas which he found in the plain-speaking Scotsman, Carlyle. But he felt, and truly, that his whole range was pitifully small. He was not naturally bookish; his taste could be stimulated as in the case of “Heroes and Hero-Worship” but he was still and now always would be in the stage where every work and every author had to be introduced and sometimes interpreted to him. “Sartor Resartus” meant nothing to him nor ever could.