F. Scott Fitzgerald on the metaphysical horror of insomnia

How have I only just discovered this remarkable essay?

— Waste and horror—what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was rash.

I need not have hurt her like that.

Nor said this to him.

Nor broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable.

The horror has come now like a storm—what if this night prefigured the night after death—what if all thereafter was an eternal quivering on the edge of an abyss, with everything base and vicious in oneself urging one forward and the baseness and viciousness of the world just ahead. No choice, no road, no hope—only the endless repetition of the sordid and the semi-tragic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lCeHQ0T138

“..life is so damned hard."
[..]
“So damned hard, so damned hard,” he repeated aimlessly; “it just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.”

Excerpt From
The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. ”

Excerpt From
The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before.”

Excerpt From
The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“...for he was young now as he would never be again, and more triumphant than death.”

Excerpt From
The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“He shut the door and coming back into the room stood for a moment lost in thought with the tennis-ball still clasped in his hand. There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk.

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“A pause—Muriel turned to Dick.
“You’re a great writer, aren’t you?”
“I’m a writer,” he confessed sheepishly.
“I always say,” said Muriel earnestly, “that if I ever had time to write down all my experiences it’d make a wonderful book.”
[..]
“Muriel continued:
“But I don’t see how you can sit down and do it. And poetry! Lordy, I can’t make two lines rhyme. Well, I should worry!”

Excerpt From
The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“I can’t make my feet behave when I hear that tune. Oh, baby!”

Excerpt From
The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“Only I like alliterative names [..] all except mine. Mine’s too flamboyant. I used to know two girls named Jinks, though, and just think if they’d been named anything except what they were named—Judy Jinks and Jerry Jinks. Cute, what? Don’t you think?”

Excerpt From
The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald

#thebeautifulanddamned #fscottfizgerald #books