This Side of Paradise
twilight he came to a graveyard. There was a dusky, dreamy smell
of flowers and the ghost of a new moon in the sky and shadows
everywhere. On an impulse he considered trying to open the door
of a rusty iron vault built into the side of a hill; a vault
washed clean and covered with late-blooming, weepy watery-blue
flowers that might have grown from dead eyes, sticky to the touch
with a sickening odor.
Amory wanted to feel “William Dayfield, 1864.”
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.
Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were
visible, with here and there a late-burning light—and suddenly
out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream
it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new
generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world,
still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams
of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting
the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long
days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray
turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more
than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success;
grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in
man shaken....
Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself—art,
politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was
safe now, free from all hysteria—he could accept what was
acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights....
There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in
riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost
youth—yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his
soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of
old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But—oh, Rosalind!
Rosalind!...
“It’s all a poor substitute at best,” he said sadly.
And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he
had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from
the personalities he had passed....
He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.
“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”
Appendix: Production notes for eBook edition 11
The primary feature of edition 11 is restoration of em-dashes
which are missing from edition 10. (My favorite instance is “I
won’t belong” rather than “I won’t be—long”.)
Characters which are 8-bit in the printed text were
misrepresented in edition 10. Edition 10 had some
end-of-paragraph problems. A handful of other minor errors are
corrected.
Two volumes served as reference for edition 11: a 1960 reprint,
and an undated reprint produced sometime after 1948. There are
a number of differences between the volumes. Evidence suggests
that the 1960 reprint has been somewhat “modernized”, and that
the undated reprint is a better match for the original 1920
printing. Therefore, when the volumes differ, edition 11 more
closely follows the undated reprint.
In edition 11, underscores are used to denote words and phrases
italicized for emphasis.
There is a section of text in book 2, chapter 3, beginning with
“When Vanity kissed Vanity,” which is referred to as “poetry”
but is formatted as prose.
I considered, but decided against introducing an 8-bit version
of edition 11, in large part because the bulk of the 8-bit
usage (as found in the 1960 reprint) consists of words commonly
used in their 7-bit form:
Aeschylus blase cafe debut debutante elan elite Encyclopaedia
matinee minutiae paean regime soupcon unaesthetic
Less-commonly-used 8-bit word forms in this book include:
anaemic bleme coeur manoeuvered mediaevalist tete-a-tete and the
name “Borge”.