"The man who blooms at thirty blooms in summer.
But the compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a
romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of
love and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its
fascination, I had fair years to waste, years that I can't honestly regret, in
seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea. Once in the middle twenties I was
driving along the High Corniche Road through the twilight with the whole French
Riviera twinkling on the sea below. As far ahead as I could see was Monte
Carlo, and though it was out of season and there were no Grand Dukes left to
gamble and E. Phillips Oppenheim was a fat industrious man in my hotel, who
lived in a bath-robe—the very name was so incorrigibly enchanting that I could
only stop the car and like the Chinese whisper: ‘Ah me! Ah me!’ It was not
Monte Carlo I was looking at. It was back into the mind of the young man with
cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again—for an
instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of
my own. And there are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an
autumn morning in New York or a spring night in Carolina when it is so quiet
that you can hear a dog barking in the next county. But never again as during that
all too short period when he and I were one person, when the fulfilled future
and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment—when life was
literally a dream."—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott
Fitzgerald (1896-1940), from “Early Success,” in
The Crack-Up, edited by
Edmund Wilson (1945)
Happy 124th birthday to my favorite writer,
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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