The Great Gatsby

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter - FSF

No telephone message arrived by the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o' clock--until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upson the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about, like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

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I see it as a night scene by El Greco: 100 houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground 4 solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a strecher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at the house--the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other poeple clean up the mess they had made.

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And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of a new world. It's vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic comtemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. . . . Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----- So we beat on, boats against the current, bourne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby