The morning of my 18th birthday didn’t feel any different than my last day of being a legal child. I woke up not feeling immediately more mature, however it did take me a second to realize that, by the power vested in the state, I was officially a legal adult. I still feel young. I’m still in grade school for the next 4 months, though I have a license, I don’t often drive, and I haven't yet felt compelled to take part in any activity that requires me to be over the age of 21. The morning of my 18th birthday, I wasn’t hit with any stroke of wisdom I was told came with age. Though, less than a week later, a quote on my English teacher’s board in the classroom, I feel as if I might have begun my journey of adult realizations.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: “...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
I wondered to myself if my teacher had selected the quote because she agreed with it or because she simply believed it fit the topic of her lecture. Then again both could be true.
How is it so that one can both be hopeless yet convinced that their work can make a difference? Fitzgerald’s belief may be that of the hubris young adults often fall victim to. His prose is convincing at first, but in all, I believe it only exacerbates the young author’s misunderstanding of a basic aspect of the human condition, though who am I but someone with less than a week of experience with the stage of life Fitzgerald lived in for decades?
Possibly a victim of the hubris I speak of, I’ll continue on regardless.
In modern times, I believe it would be bordering on—if not outright— impossible to find someone who has not struggled with tying his inherent value to his works. Seeing ourselves as human beings instead of human doings, we become tied to our accomplishments and bound by our failures. We begin to believe that we are the arbiters of our own life such that if we are successful in our works, any lingering sense of hopelessness becomes an omnipresent force rather than an unfortunate state of our own souls. Fitzgerald treats hopelessness as a simple fact of outside life that can only be overcome by our will to “make” it different.
This idea is in direct contradiction with the Christian faith that founded this society: that hopelessness is not a fact of the world we inhabit, but rather the condition of a soul that results from separation from God’s grace. The individuals with a true lust for the First Cause do not lose hope, keeping the Lord’s message in their hearts. No matter our situation, we always have something to lose as long as God reigns; hopelessness—much like happiness—is as inevitable as we wish for it to be. As it turns out, God’s omnibenevolence is quite difficult to ignore when it leads your life and precedes any worldly suffering.
I’m glad I never lost hope for an author that intrigues me, for if I had, I would not have bothered to look further into the words on the board in front of me. After minutes of research, I learned that his words were only a retrospective summary of a 20-year-old Fitzgerald’s philosophy dexterously recounted in his essay The Crack-Up, published in Esquire Magazine in 1936.
Similar to the words of George Bernard Shaw in Back to Methuselah, (“You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?’”) in that modernists laud the words of both, yet understand the context of neither. Shaw was quoting the Devil, Fitzgerald was establishing his philosophy not to preach, but to brutally attack it only a few lines later.
I quite like F. Scott Fitzgerald. I gained a great appreciation for him not from his hit The Great Gatsby (though I did enjoy that work) but from his lesser known, debut novel This Side of Paradise. Much like my favorite movie, Once Upon a Time in America, I finished the book last spring wishing I was intelligent enough to understand its palpable beauty in full. It was my belief then (and my belief now) that I was, in fact, not mature enough to fully appreciate the “bittersweetness that will reverberate for any reader who has made the difficult passage from adolescence to adulthood.”
I do believe that nothing other than Providence drove my revelation, considering the fact that less than a week after officially making the “difficult passage” myself, I was blessed with an enhanced appreciation for the novel.
A “handsome” yet “aimless” young man, Amory Blaine presents as a near-identical caricature of Fitzgerald himself. Pursuing worldly successes, lofty titles and beautiful women, Amory becomes a “personage” by the end of the novel at around age 23, surrendering to the idea that he was “safe now, free from all hysteria,” protected not by God (who he considers briefly), but by “whatever his medium should be.” Clearly, Amory considers himself of the highly intelligent class that Fitzgerald.
In the last two pages of the book, Amory accepts —yet falls short of adopting— the necessity of the institution of the Catholic Church, reasoning “Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense some one must cry ‘Thou shalt not!’” Yet, at this point in his life, there has been no permanent or authoritative figure that has done so on a more personal level, other than Monsignor Darcy, who meets an abrupt death. “There was no God in his heart,” no voice in Amory’s soul telling him what he shall and shalt not do.
Luckily, Fitzgerald lives slightly longer than our character and realizes that the “philosophy [that] fitted on to [his] early adult life,” along with his failed worldly desires were merely “childish waking dreams of imaginary heroism that were good enough to go to sleep on in restless nights.”
I, for one, believe in the profound sense of clarity that comes from a faith in something higher than creation itself. The most disgruntled atheists, I find, often revert to the simple argument that such a practice as praying in unison, or believing in an “invisible sky daddy” is for those who run to the shadows when life gets uncomfortable while rationalist atheism is for the bold who venture to seek the true state of affairs with great lucidity. Yet when one finds comfort in the world in front of him, will he not inevitably retire to a state of hopelessness when he finds that it is ridden with evil that he cannot “make” his way out of? When one believes hope is bound solely to this hopeless world, it becomes impossible to maintain the facade that true intelligence is to both understand hopelessness and conjure a reason to continue fighting anyway. It is my sincere belief that faith is the only source of the clarity and only weapon that reliably conquers hopelessness, and that the loss of this ability would result in catastrophic wailing and gnashing of teeth for all those still alive.
Hopelessness can be very easily found in the perpetual sin of man with no consideration for the promise of redemption, which is why hope is not of this world. The only way in which hope appears on the Earth is when a spirit is awakened to the grace of God. While, once understood, this is a beautiful revelation, it comes with a logical downside: hopelessness too lives in the soul. If we accept that there is no way to really heal our surroundings (as only God can), and still reject the premise that God is the ultimate answer, we will necessarily feel obsolete. Left without determination, filled with doubt.
Fitzgerald never fully reverts to Catholicism (he was raised in a Catholic household), yet relies heavily on core Christian messaging, symbolism, and language in various works. Amory’s fate remains unclear, as I refuse to submit to hopelessness, and instead pray that his heart is changed by the grace of God.
Although I have made the official, legal passage that both Fitzgerald and Amory consider and reconsider, I don’t believe I have (yet, at least) fallen down either of their paths. While Amory proclaims “I know myself, but that is all,” and Fitzgerald invokes, with a sense of resignation the likes of Matthew 5:13, “Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?,” I, once again, renew my vow to "Set [my mind] on things above, not on earthly things."
Colossians 3:2
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