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"—Waste and horror—what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was rash.
I need not have hurt her like that.
Nor said this to him.
Nor broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable.
The horror has come now like a storm—what if this night prefigured the night after death—what if all thereafter was an eternal quivering on the edge of an abyss, with everything base and vicious in oneself urging one forward and the baseness and viciousness of the world just ahead. No choice, no road, no hope—only the endless repetition of the sordid and the semi-tragic. (67)

I left myself The Crack-Up—the last work by Scott Fitzgerald that I had not yet read—for a long time, not quite ready to be finished with him, so to speak. And, in fact, reading the pieces collected and edited by Edmund Wilson in The Crack-Up only reopened the delicate wound that I think everyone who loves that beautiful and tragic man has somewhere within. It is easily touched and agitated—there is just something so moving about the man, his life, and his writing (all entangled).

I had actually already read a number of the pieces included in The Crack-Up�Echoes of the Jazz Age, My Lost City, "Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number�", and Early Success are included in another edition published by New Directions, The Jazz Age: Essays. Nevertheless, there was more than enough in the collection to fascinate; first and foremost, the titular The Crack-Up, which is Fitzgerald's own account of his breakdown, but also the selection of notebooks and letters as well as a number of interesting essays about Fitzgerald by his contemporaries.

To quote from Fitzgerald's short story The Ice Palace:

"I can't tell you how real it is to me, darling—if you don't know.