"You will admit that if it wasn't life it was magnificent."

While I'm waiting to learn of Harry Potter's fate, I've picked up Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise again. I read it years ago and am enjoying it in the second read-through. It's not quite as clean and deliberate as Gatsby, but it's engaging and sparkling and intelligent and playful, just as you want your Fitzgerald to be.

One of the reasons I enjoy Fitzgerald's work is wholly removed from his actual writing. He and Zelda--you cannot forget Zelda, an integral part of the image and the reality and everything that came after--were, and I suppose still are, the very personification of promise, of decadence and frivolity, of levity in a world trying to find its feet: the drowning out of reality with champagne and rides in open cars and splashing in big-city fountains while wearing furs and diamonds.

They circled the flame in a way that left their fates certain. Yet it's a beautiful dance until then. And so we watch.

Fitzgerald was America when everything was still possible: "They wandered on, mixing in the Broadway crowd, dreaming on the music that eddied out of the cafes. New faces flashed on and off like myriad lights, pale or rouged faces, tired, yet sustained by a wearied excitement."

Fitzgerald is like the moment before the fall.