With high hopes for himself, Fitzgerald also seems unable to accept failures; for example, even after more than a decade, he still has regrets about not being able to play college football or participate in the war and still fantasizes about them: "...my two youthful regrets: not being old enough or good enough for playing football in college, and for not going overseas during the war, resolved themselves into childhood daydreams of imaginary heroism that were good enough to go to sleep on restless nights” (520). inability to move forward after failures is his unshakeable sense of pessimism This is first evident at the beginning of the first essay where he implies how even ten years ago he didn't have much hope for himself and collapse was. inevitable: “I must balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of necessity to struggle; the belief in the inevitability of failure and yet the determination to 'succeed' - and more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intention of the future” (520). Here, although Fitzgerald speaks of the “high intentions” he claims to have for the future, he also seems to have had a strong belief that a crisis was imminent. Even Fitzgerald's pessimism