This Side of Paradise: Interlude

All you need tell me of yourself is that you still are; for the rest I merely search back in a restive memory, a thermometer that records only fevers, and match you with what I was at your age.

But men will chatter and you and I will still shout our futilities to each other across the stage until the last silly curtain falls plump! upon our bobbing heads.

But you are starting the spluttering magic-lantern show of life with much the same array of slides as I had, so I need to write you if only to shriek the colossal stupidity of people.

Amory, lately I reread Aeschylus and there in the divine irony of the “Agamemnon” I find the only answer to this bitter age—all the world tumbled about our ears, and the closest parallel ages back in that hopeless resignation.

Of one thing I’m sure—Celtic you’ll live and Celtic you’ll die; so if you don’t use heaven as a continual referendum for your ideas you’ll find earth a continual recall to your ambitions.

I’ve enjoyed imagining that you were my son, that perhaps when I was young I went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I came to, had no recollection of it...

It’s better to leave the blustering and tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better.

We can attract people, we can make atmosphere, we can almost lose our Celtic souls in Celtic subtleties, we can almost always have our own way; but splendid—rather not!

I am going to Rome with a wonderful dossier and letters of introduction that cover every capital in Europe, and there will be “no small stir” when I get there.

This sounds like a rather cynical paragraph, not at all the sort of thing that a middle-aged clergyman should write to a youth about to depart for the war; the only excuse is that the middle-aged clergyman is talking to himself.

We have great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above all, a childlike simplicity that keeps us from ever being really malicious.

He searched in his pocket for note-book and pencil and then began to write, slowly, laboriously...

And so we linger on the windless decks,
See on the spectre shore
Shades of a thousand days, poor gray-ribbed wrecks...
Oh, shall we then deplore
Those futile years!

The clouds have broken and the heavens burn
To hollow highways, paved with gravelled light
The churning of the waves about the stern
Rises to one voluminous nocturne

Why is it that the pick of the young Englishmen from Oxford and Cambridge go into politics and in the U. S. A. we leave it to the muckers?—raised in the ward, educated in the assembly and sent to Congress, fat-paunched bundles of corruption, devoid of “both ideas and ideals” as the debaters used to say.

I can forgive mother almost everything except the fact that in a sudden burst of religiosity toward the end, she left half of what remained to be spent in stained-glass windows and seminary endowments.

I can forgive mother almost everything except the fact that in a sudden burst of religiosity toward the end, she left half of what remained to be spent in stained-glass windows and seminary endowments.

Imagine a salary list that gives $350 a month to a man that can’t read and write!—yet I believe in it, even though I’ve seen what was once a sizable fortune melt away between speculation, extravagance, the democratic administration, and the income tax—modern, that’s me all over, Mabel.

Imagine a salary list that gives $350 a month to a man that can’t read and write!—yet I believe in it, even though I’ve seen what was once a sizable fortune melt away between speculation, extravagance, the democratic administration, and the income tax—modern, that’s me all over, Mabel.

As for the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough about anything to risk telling any one else about it. There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.

As for the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough about anything to risk telling any one else about it. There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.

Tom, why don’t you become a Catholic? Of course to be a good one you’d have to give up those violent intrigues you used to tell me about, but you’d write better poetry if you were linked up to tall golden candlesticks and long, even chants, and even if the American priests are rather burgeois, as Beatrice used to say, still you need only go to the sporty churches, and I’ll introduce you to Monsignor Darcy who really is a wonder.

I confess that the war instead of making me orthodox, which is the correct reaction, has made me a passionate agnostic.

The Catholic Church has had its wings clipped so often lately that its part was timidly negligible, and they haven’t any good writers any more.

This crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at best.