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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: plotted the imperfectability of man and read Shaw and Chesterton
enough to keep his mind from the edges of decadencenow suddenly
all his mental processes of the last year and a half seemed stale
and futilea petty consummation of himself ... and like a sombre
background lay that incident of the spring before, that filled
half his nights with a dreary terror and made him unable to pray.
He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code
that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism
whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed
rakes of literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American
sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his adulation of
 This Side of Paradise |