herreraThe Crack-Up
One of the greats confronts the pressures of fame in a most public forum
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Originally published as a three-part ries in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Esquire
Of cour all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work -- the big sudden blows that come, or em to come, from outside -- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within -- that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage ems to happen quick -- the cond kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.
ickiBefore I go on with this short history, let me make a general obrvation -- the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two oppod ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to e that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwi. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible,” come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It emed a romantic business to be a successful literary man -- you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived; you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Of cour within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied -- but I, for one, would not have chon any other.气眼
As the Twenties pasd, with my own twenties marching a little ahead of them, my two juvenile regrets -- at not being big enough (or good enough) to play football in college, and at not getting overas during the war -- resolved themlves into childish waking dr
eams of imaginary heroism that were good enough to go to sleep on in restless nights. The big problems of life emed to solve themlves, and if the business of fixing them was difficult, it made one too tired to think of more general problems.什么是同声传译
Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the n of futility of effort and the n of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” -- and, more than the, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills -- domestic, professional, and personal -- then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.
两败俱伤古文翻译阿拉伯语
个性英文签名For venteen years, with a year of deliberate loafing and resting out in the center -- things went on like that, with a new chore only a nice prospect for the next day. I was living hard, too, but: “Up to forty-nine it’ll be all right,” I said. “I can count on that. For a man who’s lived as I have, that’s all you could ask.”
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- And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized I had prematurely cracked.
录取通知书英语Now a man can crack in many ways -- can crack in the head, in which ca the power of decision is taken from you by others; or in the body, when one can but submit to the white hospital world; or in the nerves. William Seabrook in an unsympathetic book tells, with some pride and a movie ending, of how he became a public charge. What led to his alcoholism, or was bound up with it, was a collap of his nervous system. Though the prent writer was not so entangled -- having at the time not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months -- it was his nervous reflexes that were giving way -- too much anger and too many tears.
Moreover, to go back to my thesis that life has a varying offensive, the realization of having cracked was not simultaneous with a blow, but with a reprieve.
ud to do
Not long before, I had sat in the office of a great doctor and listened to a grave ntence. With what, in retrospect, ems some equanimity, I had gone on about my affairs in the ci
ty where I was then living, not caring much, not thinking how much had been left undone, or what would become of this and that responsibility, like people do in books; I was well insured and anyhow I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent.
But I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to e any people at all. I had en so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify mylf, my ideas, my destiny, with tho of all class that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.
