"Don't let the victor belong to the spoils."
--Anthony Patch, The Beautiful and Damned
I am down to my last two days of summer vacation, and I can't say I can complain. Three whole weeks of glorious inactivity are already too generous a gift, I'm sure you would agree. I think it's high time I am unfrozen from my stupor.
To make the most of my remaining days as a free woman, I am basking in F. Scott Fitzgerald's genius. The Beautiful and Damned is just exquisite! My favorite writer (This Side of Paradise has elevated him to the ranks of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton) is simply incapable of disappointing the reader, I must say. Literary experts invariably consider his The Great Gatsby as the perfect novel; in my opinion, his other works are definitely not far behind.
I'm about two-thirds through the novel, and I'm getting quite impatient. You see, what I really want to do is to devour it. I want to read it with abandon. I do not want to pause to catch my breath or to intensively digest a phrase. What I really want to do is to read the book as I would read Sweet Valley Twins when I was a child. I want to lose myself in its pages.
While getting engrossed in a novel as lovely as The Beautiful and Damned might seem most natural, I find that, sadly, I am now incapable of experiencing that. You see, for some years now, I have been slave to this rather annoying compulsion to consult the thesaurus for every single unfamiliar word I encounter in texts. I seem to have lost faith in context clues. This endless shift between the novel and the thesaurus keeps me from succumbing to the book's hypnotic powers.
This compulsion is a most arduous and time-consuming task, and, I have to say, Fitzgerald's eloquence isn't helping at all. He says garrulous and loquacious when he means talkative, and writes stentorian when he could easily say loud. My unsophisticated vocabulary is obviously not prepared for great books. It is highly possible that I am actually spending more time with my thesaurus than the novel.
Oh Fitzgerald, if your stories weren't so compelling (and you, so cute).
