My city's pedigree involves everyone who was anyone in the 1920's coming here to drink, whore, and play golf while feeling a vague sense of unease and ennui -- before falling prey to my city's status as a living, breathing metaphor for hubris. This latter element was vividly illustrated when the quintessential flapper, Zelda Fitzgerald, was committed to a nuthouse here after losing her mind one time too many. One of her doctors recalled his last most vivid memory of her was on a hospital camping trip for some of the more stable patients, watching her gather wet sticks in the forest in the descending gloom after a rain... Such a fall from the glamorous heights of gin bottles all over Paris and New York... And then she burned to death in a fire at the hospital in 1948.
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“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” -- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
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