Dagens dybsindige citat

[tricolor]

- Kultur er om man tager med på lejrskole.

Karen Jespersen

[Hr. Stena]

Jeg læste en række af F. Scott Fitzgeralds noveller (som iøvrigt ikke kan anbefales varmt nok IMO) i min sommerferie. I samlingen var som bonus optrykt et kolossalt essay fra The American Magazine, september 1922, hvor Fitzgerald som 25-årig, rig, succesfuld og verdensberømt blev bedt om at gøre status i essayet "What I Think and Feel at 25". Essayet er fantastisk skrevet, fuldt af paradokser, provokationer og påståligheder:

For one thing I do not like old people - They are always talking about their "experience", and very few of them have any! But it is the old folks that run the world, so they try to hide the fact that only young people are attractive or important.

But I am really not old enough to begin drawing morals out of my own life to elevate the young. I will save that passtime until I'm sixty, and then, as I have said, I will concoct a Scott Fitzgerald who will make Benjamin Franklin look like a lucky devil who loafed into prominence. Even in the above account I have managed to sketch a outline of a small but neat halo. I take it all back. I am twenty-five years old. I wish I had ten millions dollars, and never had to do another lick of work as long as I live.

Kerneindsigten

But as I do have to keep at it, I might as well declare that the chief thing I've learned so far: If you don't know much - well, nobody else knows much more. And nobody knows half as much about your own interests as you know.

If you believe in anything very strongly - including yourself - and you go after that thing alone, you end up in jail, in heaven, in the headlines, or in the largest house in the block, according to what you started after. If you don't believe in anything very strongly - including yourself - you go along and enough money is made out of you to buy an automobile for some others fellow's son, and you marry if you've got time, and if you do you have a lot of children, whether you have time or not, and finally you get tired and you die.
If you're in the second of the those two classes you have the most fun before you're twenty-five. If you're in the first, you have it afterward.

Også lidt lol om ægteskabet:

...after thirty, both husband and wife know in their hearts that the game is up. Without a few cocktails social intercourse becomes a torment. It is no longer spontanenous; it is a convention by which they agree to shut their eyes to the fact that the other men and women they know are tired, dull and fat, and yet must be put up with as politely as they themselves are put up with in their turn.
I have seen many happy young couples - but I have seldom seen a happy home after husband and wife are thirty. Most homes can be divided into four classes:
1st. Where the husband is a pretty conceited guy who thinks that a dinky insurance business is a lot harder than raising babies and that everybody ought to kow-tow to him at home. He is the kind whose sons usually get away from home as soon as they can walk.
2d. When the wife has got a sharp tongue and the martyr complex, and thinks she's the only woman in the world that ever had a child. This is probably the unhappiest home of all.
3d. Where the children are always being reminded how nice it was of the parents to bring them into the world, and how they ought to respect their parents for being born in 1870 instead of 1902.
4d. Where everything is for the children. Where the parents pay much more for the children's education than they afford, and spoil them unreasonably. This usually ends by the children being ashamed of the parents.

And yet I think that marriage is the most satisfatory institution we have. I'm simply stating my belief that when Life has used us for its purposes it takes away all our attractive qualities and gives us, instead, ponderous but shallow convictions of our own wisdom and "experience".

Her citeret fra The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Bryant Mangum p. 280 og pp. 282-3.

[GhostInTheShell]

The doer alone learneth

- ukendt pragmatiker ganske vist