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i_llumi's review against another edition
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. “I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all--”
plot summary: princeton graduate hates the poor, women, and old men then becomes a socialist
(serio. o amory literalmente chuta pobres. sem meme)
//
you know anything remotely "review-ish" that I write about this book will sound very Dumb and Obvious so I'll just say what I want in a list:
- it is incredibly fascinating how relevant this story is today (especially for teenagers. teenagers literally have not changed in a century and that is kind of hilarious). much of the worries and reflections Amory & company had are things we all think about daily - the shitty world, wanting to become a socialist and change said shitty world, thinking we are all so smart and great when in reality we are just hiding behind social labels to conceal the emptiness inside us... Amory WAS the sadboy of the roaring twenties.
he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.
With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.
Gets to college and has a problematical future. Feels lost without his circle, and always says that school days were happiest, after all. Goes back to school and makes speeches about what St. Regis’s boys are doing.
[he] sat in the train, and thought about himself for thirty-six hours.
“All I’d like would be a little home in the country, some warm country, and a wife, and just enough to do to keep from rotting."
He found it impossible to study conic sections; something in their calm and tantalizing respectability breathing defiantly through Mr. Rooney’s fetid parlors distorted their equations into insoluble anagrams.
“Just to be dramatic, I’ll let you know that if it’s blue, my name is withdrawn from the editorial board of the Prince, and my short career is over.”
“I’ve lost half my personality in a year.”
Amory’s envy and admiration of this step was drowned in an experience of his own to which he never succeeded in giving an appropriate value, but which, nevertheless, haunted him for three years afterward.
“I want some one stupid. Oh, send some one stupid!” This to the black fence opposite him, in whose shadows the footsteps shuffled... shuffled. He supposed “stupid” and “good” had become somehow intermingled through previous association.
gayly from the train, but on the platform
“Burne, I think they’re the ugliest-looking crowd I ever came across. They look like an old man’s home.”
“You’re really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of depression when you think you’ve been slighted. In fact, you haven’t much self-respect.”
“There you go—running through your catalogue of emotions in five seconds.”
American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy.
Honestly, Alec, she treats men terribly. She abuses them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and yawns in their faces—and they come back for more.
ROSALIND: (Sadly) Oh, nothing—only I want sentiment, real sentiment—and I never find it.
AMORY: I never find anything else in the world—and I loathe it.
ROSALIND: It’s so hard to find a male to gratify one’s artistic taste.
“She’s life and hope and happiness, my whole world now.”
(Between a laugh and a sob) Thanks.
“It’s ghastly!” “And I wish American novelists would give up trying to make business romantically interesting. Nobody wants to read about it, unless it’s crooked business.
For months it seemed that he had alternated between being borne along a stream of love or fascination, or left in an eddy, and in the eddies he had not desired to think, rather to be picked up on a wave’s top and swept along again.
“I detest poor people,” thought Amory suddenly. “I hate them for being poor."
Q.—Are you corrupt?
A.—I think so. I’m not sure. I’m not sure about good and evil at all any more."
“When life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education,” began Amory slowly, “that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned.
“Modern life,” began Amory again, “changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has berbre—populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and—we’re dawdling along."
"They don’t think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won’t see that if they don’t pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we’re going round and round in a circle. That—is the great middle class!”
- the writing!!! is!! so!! pretty!!!!!!!! the immaculate vibes man
From the first he loved Princeton—its lazy beauty, its half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds, and under it all the air of struggle that pervaded his class.
The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time—time that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights.
under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low, cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees—only the boy might change, and this one was so nice.
As in the story-books, she ran into them, and on that half-minute, as their lips first touched, rested the high point of vanity, the crest of his young egotism.
You are unsentimental, almost incapable of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being proud.
at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.
“You know,” whispered Tom, “what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.”
“And what we leave here is more than this class; it’s the whole heritage of youth. We’re just one generation—we’re breaking all the links that seemed to bind us here to top-booted and high-stocked generations. We’ve walked arm and arm with Burr and Light-Horse Harry Lee through half these deep-blue nights.”
No more to wait the twilight of the moon in this sequestered vale of star and spire, for one eternal morning of desire passes to time and earthy afternoon. Here, Heraclitus, did you find in fire and shifting things the prophecy you hurled down the dead years; this midnight my desire will see, shadowed among the embers, furled in flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.
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.
Because selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.
She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature.
Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?
“Are you very cold?” asked Amory. “No, I’m thinking about myself—my black old inside self, the real one, with the fundamental honesty that keeps me from being absolutely wicked by making me realize my own sins.”
But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror.
The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between ... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homeward and let new lights come in with the sun.
Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.
I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing.
Women—of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts, marvellously incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of experience—had become merely consecrations to their own posterity. Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all removed by their very beauty, around which men had swarmed, from the possibility of contributing anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to write.
In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance of the labyrinth. Another dawn flung itself across the river; a belated taxi hurried along the street, its lamps still shining like burning eyes in a face white from a night’s carouse. A melancholy siren sounded far down the river.
My whole generation is restless.
Weak things were often beautiful, weak things were never good. And in this new loneness of his that had been selected for what greatness he might achieve, beauty must be relative or, itself a harmony, it would make only a discord.
He wondered that graves ever made people consider life in vain. Somehow he could find nothing hopeless in having lived. All the broken columns and clasped hands and doves and angels meant romances. He fancied that in a hundred years he would like having young people speculate as to whether his eyes were brown or blue, and he hoped quite passionately that his grave would have about it an air of many, many years ago. It seemed strange that out of a row of Union soldiers two or three made him think of dead loves and dead lovers, when they were exactly like the rest, even to the yellowish moss.
- the women in this book,,,, oh my god... (also. Amory was totally the type of guy who said "you're not like other girls" to every single woman he ever came across, YA love interests yall lose!)
In her eyes was the light of the idealist, the inviolate dreamer of Joan-like dreams.
“Yes, I do,” she interrupted. “I do, because you’re always talking about yourself and I used to like it; now I don’t.”
Her goodness was above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of female virtue.
“I think,” he said and his voice trembled, “that if I lost faith in you I’d lose faith in God.” She looked at him with such a startled face that he asked her the matter. “Nothing,” she said slowly, “only this: five men have said that to me before, and it frightens me.”
ROSALIND is—utterly ROSALIND. She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural prerogative.
ROSALIND had been disappointed in man after man as individuals, but she had great faith in man as a sex.
The unfortunate part is that the only men who interest me at all are the totally ineligible ones.
GILLESPIE: And you haven’t kissed me for two weeks. I had an idea that after a girl was kissed she was—was—won.
ROSALIND: Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.
ROSALIND: No—no—I’m taking the hardest course, the strongest course. Marrying you would be a failure and I never fail—if you don’t stop walking up and down I’ll scream!
ROSALIND: (...) Oh, don’t ask me. You know I’m old in some ways—in others—well, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness—and I dread responsibility. I don’t want to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry whether my legs will get slick and brown when I swim in the summer.
AMORY: And you love me.
ROSALIND: That’s just why it has to end. Drifting hurts too much.
“And me,” Amory interrupted, “where did you see me?” “Oh, you’re one of those men,” she answered haughtily, “must lug old self into conversation."
“We’re just voices now,” murmured Eleanor, “little lonesome voices. Light another.”
“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the wretchedest thing of all is me—oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid—? Look at you; you’re stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified—and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.
Who? I’m too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention.
terribly sorry for the spam but as one of the ending commentaries said,
To read This Side of Paradise once is to read it twice and quote it endlessly.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Alcoholism, Death, and Alcohol
Minor: Incest, Physical abuse, Sexual content, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, and War