4 - The Half-Life of Edna Pontellier

Summary

It was then that a new note separated itself jarringly from the soft crying of the night … the noise of a woman's laughter. It began low, incessant … [then] reached a high point, tensed and stifled, almost the quality of a scream – then it ceased and left behind it a silence empty and menacing as the greater silence overhead. … The room had grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind. Life was that sound out there, that ghastly reiterated female sound.

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922)

It is perhaps excusable to recall with a touch of envy the time when a teacher could, without embarrassment, distribute The Lifetime Reading Plan or some such guide to literacy, and expect students to measure their progress toward adulthood by the number of checks beside the titles read. There is a certain comfort in the authority of lists. But, however reluctantly, one must concede that it is a better measure of maturity (in a teacher as well as a student) to know that we shall not soon have such lists again. The idea of the classic, if it is to be saved at all in our relativistic time, seems to need continual rescue from the idea of the absolute.