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YOUNG_FITZGERALD

                                             June 7, 2010

  The young F. Scott Fitzgerald
  had a particularly grim view       (A key qualification for a
  of the human conditionl            great writer, as opposed
                                     to an author of fluff
     He had this                     about naked young women
     conviction that                 lounging in bathtubs).
     our attitudes are
     dictated almost
     entirely by our
     physical age--

         Through some combination
         of biological changes,
         and I would gather, the       I get the sense he might've
         inevitable, crushing          settled on biology alone as
         disappointments of life,      the determinant, were he
         we're condemned to trace      not a fictioneer.
         a fixed arc between
         enthusiasm and despair.                  It's hard for even the
                                                  most Serious and
                                                  Literary to completely
                                                  abandon romanticism.

          "She began for the first time to seek
          women friends, to prefer books she had
          read before, to sew a little where she
          could watch her two children to whom she
          was devoted. She worried about little
          things--if she saw crumbs on the
          dinner-table her mind drifted off the
          conversation: she was receding gradually
          into middle age."

                 --  "Flappers and Philosophers" (1920),
                     "The Cut-Glass Bowl"

                                           (A better titled
                                           would be "The
                                           Curs-ed Bowl".)


          So, can we evaluate the
          value of this disturbing
          take?


                                 FRESH_EYE

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