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celebrated people

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p. 96:

I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day.

When you live alone in a feudal mansion, with gardens spuming the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate, how do you mask the inescapable stink of loneliness? What pulsating energy could pierce the hardened cocoon of disaffection to warm a heart made cold with mysterious wealth?

There’s no better distraction than the whirling carnival of people crashing a party where everyone and no one really belongs. Let the folly of others be a movie for which you’ll gladly douse your illumination in favor of sitting in the dark with your attention devoted to anyone else’s story, anyone at all so long as it isn’t you. If the others are just interesting enough, perhaps they can be elevated to a celebrity that attracts the curiosity of those who can be fulfilled by nothing more than being hopelessly curious about a celebrity. Then you can be alone with many birds of a feather, packed together in a frenzy of distance, locked in a solemn vow never to connect. It’s best that way for everyone involved.

Gatsby couldn’t be sure that Daisy would be interested in him. He hardly knew what he was himself, consisting of no substance other than blindered ambition. He had no sensical idea of what an interesting person could be, other than to accept the judgment of others conferring the crown of celebrity. So he filled his house with interesting people, celebrated people, all gathered to have the time of their lives, or at least avoid the fear of missing out.

humiliation of my towels

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p. 95:

Daisy went upstairs to wash her face – too late I thought with humiliation of my towels – while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.

This is a beautiful bit of technique, I just want to deconstruct it very carefully. We’ve just come out of one of the most emotionally intense moments in the book, the reunion of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, the goal of Gatbsy’s years-long quest finally realized. This scene has taken place off-stage, from narrator Nick’s perspective, as he departed his own house in order to give the couple privacy. So Nick has been standing in the rain on his modest little lawn for half an hour, the lawn that Nick had allowed to grow shaggy and unkempt until that morning, when Gatsby had sent his landscaper around for a proper mowing.

Now Nick re-enters his house to see Daisy’s face shining with happy tears, Gatsby relaxed and composed where before the meeting he’d been a nervous wreck. Whatever happened in that half hour had been full of painful joy. Daisy goes to clean up, the men wait. Such a simple action, it could have passed by without any further flourish. But Fitzgerald takes this opportunity to show us the reflexive thought that enters Nick’s head, a simple and true statement that he’s embarrassed that he forgot to do something about his dingy towels in the upstairs bath. It reveals the kind of person Nick is, his class concerns, the ever-present impulse of self-judgment that resides within him as surely as his heartbeat.

The narrative of this novel is about Gatsby and Daisy, but the genius of it is that the story is about Nick. We learn nearly nothing about the interior lives of the purported main couple. But we learn everything about Nick in these stealthily delivered injections of perspective.

gusts of emotion

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p. 94:

While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little, now and then, with gusts of emotion.

After those first awkward moments before Gatsby regains his composure, Nick tactfully leaves his own home and stands outside in the inclement weather, taking shelter under ‘a huge black knotted tree whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain,‘ while Daisy and Gatsby negotiate their sudden reacquaintance. Fitzgerald makes the clever choice to leave the most emotionally charged moments unobserved, and so undescribed by our unreliable narrator – which makes these moments more elemental and enduring, mysterious events like the weather itself. The storm is more powerful for having been unseen, its aftermath the best evidence of its power. Gatsby relays Nick’s obvious news that the rain has ended, and her response has nothing to do with the weather.

‘I’m glad, Jay.’ Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.

unforgettable reproach

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p. 93:

He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable reproach and opening the door cautiously went back into the other room.

In just this moment, Gatsby ends the only few minutes of the entire story where he is not composed and fully in control of himself. All he needed was for Nick to remind him that Daisy was embarrassed too, and a gentleman wouldn’t leave a lady alone and embarrassed in any situation.

The feelings of other people are always more real to them than any feelings you can have for them – remembering this is the key to maintaining emotional composure; this is both a pillar of support and a tool of manipulation, depending on how it’s used.

physical decency

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p.92:

Amid the welcome confusion of cups and cakes a certain physical decency established itself.

Overwhelming events can cause a mental freeze in the participants. The mind races to absorb the inflow of sights, sounds and emotions, but the cascade of signals piles up into a mass of unintelligible phenomena, the mind freezes and loses fine-grained control of the body. In this situation, the most important thing to do is: anything. Take any action to break the freeze, preferably one that is productive to the moment or at least not wholly inappropriate.

Gatsby, Nick and Daisy are locked in an excruciatingly awkward social moment, but all it takes is some cups and cakes to break the freeze.

glaring tragically

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p. 91:

Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.

This sounds like a description of a man at a funeral, rather than a man on the doorstep to a reunion with his lost love. Fitzgerald never describes what Gatsby is thinking or feeling, but instead describes his trembling hands, distraught eyes, the tense bearing of his ‘strained counterfeit of perfect ease.’ The economy of writing here paints a lush landscape of emotion with spare strokes of perfect detail. The thoughts that are not described imbue the scene with their heavy absence.

wild tonic

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p. 90:

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

Daisy’s voice is her defining feature. Is there another character in all of literature whose physical beauty is conveyed so much by sound rather than sight? With subtle mastery, Fitzgerald elevates his prose anytime he describes her voice – he brings tonality and life into his writing to simulate the intoxicating effect of Daisy’s voice on the listener. Fitzgerald’s writing is cinematic, and this technique of surrounding a detail with vibrant prose is like dramatic lighting on a closeup of a beautiful face.

I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car.

To hear her voice is to love her, as long as her warm breath vibrates in the air. Like the sound of her voice, this love is temporary and fragile, but rich and real and irresistible in the moment.

his expression

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p. 89:

He looked out the window at it, but judging from his expression I don’t believe he saw a thing.

Moments before Daisy’s arrival, there’s nothing left to prepare. The grass has been cut, the cottage has been stocked with tea and cakes and a greenhouse of flowers. Gatsby is elegant, casual, perfectly tailored and utterly petrified. He can’t see; light enters his eye, draws on his retinas, but his brain isn’t really putting together the images.

The moment before the big moment is always excruciating and beautiful. Glorious success or crushing defeat could be seconds away, and this moment before is a quantum state where both are present at the same time, both so real that the mind and body experience both elation and desolation at once.

different circumstances

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p. 88:

I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life.

Nick has a curiously compartmentalized sense of morality. He is in the midst of setting up his neighbor for an affair with his cousin, a married woman. The marriage is merely a solemn vow of a committed pair, one of whom is his blood relation, a bond promised to hearts, to society, presumably to some god. These things don’t concern Nick. He also hasn’t much concern for whether his newfound friend is even pursuing something that is attainable or even worth attaining – is this chase going to lead to sustainable love, or only to heartbreaking ruin?

But when Gatsby suggests some means of making money to Nick, who is vaguely aware that Gatsby’s ways of making money aren’t held in high regard by polite society – well then, here is some moral crisis. The morality that Nick has already ignored at this point merely involves matters of love, marriage and friendship. The morality of money, the right and wrong ways to make it, is somehow less easy to ignore. Nick thinks that ‘because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there.’

Nick’s sense of morality here seems less thoughtful than habitual, something deeply bred but not deeply considered. He could only realize afterwards that he might have been facing a moral crisis; in the moment he was acting because he had ‘no choice,’ his refusal was a reflexive reaction rather than a decision point. But what precisely is so bad about being offered money to do something that perhaps you might have done anyway? Is the problem that an offer of money forces you to consider whether you really should be doing the thing for free, or doing it all?

Does Nick have any sense of morality that isn’t grounded only in politeness? He already knows at this point that this setup isn’t an innocent tea time. The irony here is that Nick did in fact face a moment of moral crisis, and he never even realized it, even after the fact. He chose to assist someone else’s adulterous, ruinous fantasy. He chose to ignore bonds of family and friendship. He can continue to sell his bonds from the moral high ground of having refused a little extra money from some shady connections, and continue to fail to think about whether his morality is grounded in truth or merely in custom.

grass cut

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p. 87:

‘I want to get the grass cut,’ he said.

After much fumbling and misdirection, Gatsby has finally asked of Nick the very small favor that Nick invite his cousin over for tea. All the years of dreaming and scheming have led Gatsby to this improbably coincidental tête-à-tête, where he will casually drop in as an unannounced visitor. He’s painted this scene in his mind thousands of times, and he stands on his neighbor’s lawn finally making a concrete plan, looking over the final details of the dream becoming reality … and he’s disappointed in the condition of the grass. ‘We both looked at the grass — there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began.’

Is obsessive attention to detail insanity or genius? Would Daisy notice an unkempt lawn as she pulled up to Nick’s cottage for tea? If she did, would she have any distaste for low-caliber landscaping? And if she did even then, wouldn’t any stray thoughts in her head be blown away, like cobwebs in a hurricane, by the appearance of her lost love? Or would the minor mental distress over shabby grass make her marginally less likely to rekindle fiery love from forgotten embers?

Why leave anything to chance? How Gatsby got rich is said to be one of the mysteries of the story. But there’s no mystery here at all – the ‘why’ of his wealth has always been front and center: because he wants the love of his past. And the ‘how’ is right here, hiding in plain sight: Gatsby’s rich because he leaves no detail in disrepair, because he can’t abide a bit of weedy green on the lawn of his dreams.