Anti-Climacus

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: In my ongoing task of acquiring a knowledge of the rudiments of literary culture, I have found myself turning to the lesser works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Perhaps it's because I've found myself thinking of Princeton more than usual of late (and given that the usual is close to never, I find this plausible); perhaps it's because I've had the realization in the past week or two that I no longer hold the position I used to take for the, er, joy of enraging the sort of people who get worked up over literary questions ('20th century literature sucks'), and in fact find in early-20th century American literature an idiom and stylistic approach that is both useful and interesting to me.

Anyway, long story short: you'd never know it from The Great Gatsby, but this Fitzgerald guy is all kinds of funny. I had a conversation with a friend a week or so ago, where I suggested that we're generally raised to believe that the worth of something is measured by how hard it is. But my experience has led me to think that sometimes giving up really is the smartest thing to do--character-building and masochism run together at some point, and hopefully one of the lessons of maturity is to figure out how to keep cases of the former, and get rid of the latter. So I was particularly entertained to read it said much better than I ever could, in "How to Waste Material:"

"It is here that these confessions tie up with a general problem as well as with those peculiar to the writer. The decision as to when to quit, as to when one is merely floundering around and causing other people trouble, has to be made frequently in a lifetime. In youth we are taught the rather simple rule never to quit, because we are presumably following programmes made by people wiser than ourselves. My own conclusion is that when one has embarked on a course that grows increasingly doubtful and one feels the vital forces beginning to be used up, it is best to ask advice if decent advice is in range. Columbus didn't and Lindbergh couldn't. So my statement at first seems heretical to the idea that it is pleasantest to live with--the idea of heroism. But I make a sharp division between one's professional life, when after a short period of apprenticeship not more than ten per-cent of advice is worth a hoot, and one's private and worldly life, where almost anyone's judgment is better than one's own."