The Great Gatsby
Now on my second reading, I’m in shock at how cursorily I must have read the book when I was just a high school junior. Whatever preconceived notions of illusion and disillusion I had before were torn away, and back then, ideas like desire and even money were remote to me because my life was in the schoolhouse and not in reality. I hadn’t desired anything nor anyone nor known the practical implications of money, but I argued about the concepts in school essays in that clinical, analytic, pedantic style; as convincing as a dead doctor examining a live cadaver. After 5 years, Gatsby is a lot less romantic than real, and so are Tom and Daisy less callously evil than real. Even the ghostly and golden New York seems within arm’s length now that I’ve lived there, and felt firsthand the paradox of electric buzz and sharp loneliness in what can be justly called a grotesquely beautiful sea of strangers. The novel has only grown more striking as I’ve grown mature.
If the surface theme is that Gatsby is stuck in his past illusion of Daisy, then the layer deeper would be about the trickling stream called Time; it caresses at first, and then over an infinity of infinitesimal moments, lacerates and remakes. Gatsby is odd if only because he seemed rather immune to Time’s weathering, but Daisy had simply grown up – it seems rather inevitable that the boy Gatsby and woman Daisy would not end well. Outside of the novel, Time trickles so slowly that I’ve only gotten glimpses of it in those rare times I’ve reconnected with acquaintances I’d not seen in years, mainly high school classmates. Some are already married. Another had died. Some had forsaken their passions for a practical career. Some abandoned practicality to pursue their dreams while they still could. Others still, I found difficult to even empathize with and understand them, because of how much our worldviews had been molded by the college years. And all of this is near the source of Time’s winding and relentless tributary. I’ll look back on these thoughts many years from now and realize that this was the same force that had built the earth, the same invisible, meticulous sculptor who built the whole Grand Canyon to the Himalayas. It’s oddly terrifying, yet reassuring, that Time’s chisel touches me and you and everything in the whole wide universe, in that same gentle, yet violent way.
% grep -i "the great gatsby" quotes.txt7 matches
on vivacity
“High over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life”
— (Nick Carraway), F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
on poignance
“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye… At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life”
— (Nick Carraway), F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
on judgment
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you had”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
on disillusionment
“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
on disillusionment
“[The green light] had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
on disillusionment
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic 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 further… And one fine morning --- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
on superficiality
“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 upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby