For its own sake
DICK: (Pompously ) Art isn’t meaningless.
MAURY: It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.
Anthony: In other words, Dick, you’re playing before a grand stand peopled with ghosts.
MAURY: Give a good show anyhow.
Anthony:(To MAURY) On the contrary, I’d feel that it being a meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless.
DICK: Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want every one to accept that sophistic rot?
Anthony: Yeah, I suppose so.
MAURY: No, sir! I believe that every one in America but a selected thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of morals — Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don’t complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.
(Here the soup arrives and what MAURY might have gone on to say is lost for all time. )
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
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