This Side of Paradise

ROSALIND: Mother, I never think about money.

MRS. CONNAGE: You never keep it long enough to think about it.

Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy.

In a good-natured way he had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands, was rather a treat.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. . . .

There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth — yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.

In the case of Beatrice’s money this was not so pronounced, but it was obvious that his father had devoted the previous year to several unfortunate gambles in oil. Very little of the oil had been burned, but Stephen Blaine had been rather badly singed.

“The truth is that the public has done one of those startling and amazing things that they do about once in a hundred years. They’ve seized an idea.”

“What is it?”

“That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.”

He stretched his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. "I know myself," he cried, "but that is all — "

Look at you; you're on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do things and all that. What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting, and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book, or policy that is assigned you to deal with. The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the people buy the issue.

He doesn't believe that public swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it.

And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he has passed....

Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter...

And the rain and over the fields a voice calling...

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation — with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher — a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

The shadow of a dove

Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings;

And down the valley through the crying trees

The body of the darker storm flies; brings

With its new air the breath of sunken seas

And slender tenuous thunder . . .

But I wait . . .

Wait for the mists and for the blacker rain —

Heavier winds that stir the veil of fate,

Happier winds that pile her hair;

Again

They tear me, teach me, strew the heavy air

Upon me, winds that I know, and storm.