The Airportline: Observations

I am occupied with different tasks, so today I will give the word to F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, and famously made fun in A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway for his weak tolerance for alcohol. The following quote was sent to me a few weeks ago and although I am sure many of you have read it, it deserves to be read again, cause it is beautifully written and based on an idea that I myself try and adhere to the best I can, namely, not judging people. So, while I continue to destroy my head and shoulders with some tedious tasks I give you part of the first page from The Great Gatsby:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

Tomorrow Airportline will attend a conference called 'Sex, an evolutionary success story'. If I learn something I will let you know.