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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 condition.            great writer, as opposed
                                     to an author of fluff
     He had this conviction          about naked young women
     that our attitudes are          lounging in bathtubs).
     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
                                      Cursed Bowl".)


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


                                 FRESH_EYE


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