"The Great Gatsby"

[fiefoe]

Chris recalls this being 'emo nonsense', and I'm not unsympathetic to his view. If I'd also read it in high school, I'd have thought adults should simply know better.

• the secret griefs of wild, unknown men
• a romantic readiness
• the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men
• dispensed starlight to casual moths
• Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
• ... because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her... He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion,... decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way.
  
• a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing
• for a transitory enchanted moment man must have... compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
  

<A hold-your-breath passage:>
    The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees - he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. ... He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.

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