This Side of Paradise

For me, today always marks the beginning of the next chapter. I should say yesterday afternoon, since this is when the palpable shift begins. After the gifts have been opened and leftovers sufficiently picked over, my eyes draw away with some relief and exhaustion from the mood that has been building, in essence, since late October. Not even the bravest shoot is surfacing through the snow, yet I am drawn toward the shorter hemlines and longer days of spring. Unfortunately, the dark dullness of leftover winter still stands between those days and today, threatening to draw even the most spirited among us into its dank chill.

As with her biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, I am entranced by my current read, Nancy Milford's exhaustive telling of the life of F. Scott's wife, Zelda Fitzgerald. I identify with the early days of their marriage, before it was marred by competitiveness (which I find strange inserted into a marriage), addiction and mental illness. Riding the wave of the Jazz Age, they spent countless hours talking and traveling, enjoying each other's company and their unique life together. They had many acquaintances and a few close friends, but preferred the companionship of each other over anything they could find outside their own home. The couple would stay up all night, remembering times in Paris or on the Riviera, their eyes bright with possibility. To paraphrase Zelda, she felt that she couldn't find the depth of conversation she had with Scott with other people, so wasn't terribly interested in the pursuit. Of course, I enjoy the company of a variety of people, but I also find such content and contentment in our own words, if these are all I have, I'm satisfied.

"I don't want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally."

                                                                                  --Zelda Fitzgerald

"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?"

"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over."

"The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny."

                                                                                 --F. Scott Fitzgerald