Fitzgerald

One of my favorite American authors is F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love his use of words and interweaving of stories with poems and songs. Beautiful. I just finished This Side of Paradise, his first novel. I wanted to share some thoughts I had from it:

- We are so un-aware of the etymology of our words. For example, the word "doll" as used to describe women refers to a girl who looks pretty but doesn't talk. Someone who is pretty to look at, but doesn't have a thought, or someone men don't want to speak. Such a term was widely used in the 1920s, the period Fitzgerald write about, but it is still used today. However, we have forgotten the etymology, that it was at one time almost a derogatory word. We now use it to admonish women. Ladies how does that make you feel?

- At one point the main character is having a discussion with one of the girls he likes about his favorite season. When he reveals he functions around the liturgical calendar, finding Christmas and Easter to be most pleasant, the young girl (Eleanor) replies that Easter is "Spring in corsets!" While we might want to laugh at this at first, how true it is, especially in terms of the church! We take all the joy of Easter and stuff it into pretty dresses and gloves, missing the entire messy beauty of the risen Lord!

- At the end of the book, in the footnotes (yes, I do read them sometimes. haha) the 1920s was described as "the Jazz Age - that time when American culture [was] obsessed with youth, fashion, money, music, liquor, and sex." I had to giggle when I read this because it is just as true in 2009 as in was in the 1920, and just furthers my thesis that the new millennium is just a reliving of the 1920s.