Topical Guide 592
Mark Dorset
Advice: Good, Bad, Indifferent, Who Knows?
Allusion, Quotation
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 11:
I ARRIVED IN GENERAL SCIENCE the following Monday expecting the next step in the development of our questions and group work. I’m sure we all expected that. We expected continuity. Continuity was what we had been taught to expect, and we had learned the lesson, we had come to expect continuity, and we planned our little lives accordingly—do the next thing, that was our motto—but discontinuity was Miss Rheingold’s style. Instead of having us work on our papers she showed us a movie.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise:
“You’re developing. This has given you time to think and you’re casting off a lot of your old luggage […]. People like us can’t adopt whole theories […]. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme […] is concerned—we’d just make asses of ourselves.”
“But, Monsignor, I can’t do the next thing.”
“Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it myself. I can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe on that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall.”
“Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I should do.”
“We have to do it because we’re not personalities, but personages.”
“That’s a good line—what do you mean?”
“[…] Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.”
“And several of my most glittering possessions had fallen off when I needed them.” Amory continued the simile eagerly.
“Yes, that’s it; when you feel that your garnered prestige and talents and all that are hung out, you need never bother about anybody; you can cope with them without difficulty.”
“But, on the other hand, if I haven’t my possessions, I’m helpless!”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s certainly an idea.”
See also:
Allusion; Quotation TG 140, TG 455, TG 462, TG 502, TG 506, TG 532, TG 559, TG 583
Advice: Bad TG 129, Dangerous TG 545
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