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.

the conflict question

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Recent events remind me of one of my favorite hiring tales. I used to ask prospective hires an annoying interview question, one of those open-ended travelogues that journeyed through odd pathways and byways but always ended up in the same cramped room, where two colleagues were locked in irreconcilable conflict, and the proposal of only one could proceed. Depending on the mindset and tenacity of the candidate, this question could take 3 minutes or closer to 30.

Once I was the last interviewer in an extended, multi-day interview slate. Around twenty people had already interviewed the candidate – this was for a small, tightly-knit company, and in such circumstances it’s not unusual (though it may be inadvisable) for nearly all of the company to interview new members of the tribe. So by the time she came to me, she’d already been run a bit ragged.

I proceeded to launch into what I called The Conflict Question. Due to some combination of my mood, her mindset, the weather and wicked chance, this version unfurled into an inquisition taking the better part of an hour. I felt like I learned a lot about her, and was happy to recommend a hire.

I barely made it back to my desk when one of the company stalwarts stormed up to me and dragged me to an empty conference room. Although I held a senior position, I hadn’t been with the company very long, and this guy held considerably greater history and moral authority (quite correctly and deservedly, in my view).

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he hissed.

“What?”

“We have a critical hire to fill here, we found this amazing candidate. She’s been interviewing for days and everybody loves her. Every single person gave her rave reviews. She gets to you, the very last interview – more of a formality than anything – and now she doesn’t want to work here. She says if assholes like you are in senior management, this can’t be the kind of place she’d like to work!”

“What?! Uh ….” My mind raced through the interview, playing it back and forth in my head like the Zapruder film. What did I do? What did I say? Admittedly the interview did get a little strained, spending the bulk of time on a question whose very essence is about conflict. Not infrequently, the course of the question presses conflict so extensively that it can be said to generate real conflict as well. I didn’t think I’d crossed any kind of line, but then again if I had it wouldn’t be the first (or the last) time I’d done so without realizing it.

I asked frantic questions about what she said about the interview and whether there was any chance of saving the hire. My colleague furiously insisted she was only reacting appropriately to my unforgivable boorishness. His red-faced anger thrashed me like an invisible whip … and then I saw that this was the strangest thing of all. I’d always admired his grace under pressure – I had watched him work with grim calm through disastrous crises and deplorable failures. He was, as far as I knew then, an obdurate, utterly reliable, improbably emotionless rock of a man.

“Whoa, whoa, waitaminute,” I said. “Are you fucking her? Or trying to?”

The passion drained from his face. It wasn’t the passion of anger, as I thought, but passion itself. He took a moment to gather himself, drew in a deep breath, and finally hung his head as he answered, simply and plainly: “Yes. Yes I am.”

“Ok. Now get the fuck out of my office,” I said, which was a weird thing to say as we were standing in a conference room and I had no office. “Now wait – just so you know – I’ll fix this, I’ll go make nice with her and we’ll bring her on. But I don’t think my interview was wrong, and I don’t think what I found is wrong: she doesn’t like conflict, especially when she thinks she should be walking into a friendly situation. I might be an asshole, but her job might sometimes require making assholes do good work, so that’s something you’ll have to deal with – as her boyfriend, perhaps, but not in any role that could possibly be supervisory. So thanks for letting me know.”

We hired her. She was great. She wasn’t so bad at handling conflict (and assholes), but I’m pretty sure she didn’t like it. And she certainly was never put into a conflict of interest with her romantic relationship, because everyone was transparent from the start. Their relationship with each other has long outlasted any of ours with the company, and is certain to outlast the company itself. At the end, there was nothing left of real or imagined conflict, nothing but a funny story.

It’s all so easy when the truth is out at the beginning.

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.

welcome to SV, DBs

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‘That’s why,’ said Azaz, ‘there was one very important thing about your quest that we couldn’t discuss until you returned.’

‘I remember,’ said Milo eagerly, ‘Tell me now.’

‘It was impossible,’ said the king, looking at the Mathemagician.

‘Completely impossible,’ said the Mathemagician, looking at the king.

‘Do you mean –‘ stammered the bug, who suddenly felt a bit faint.

‘Yes indeed,’ they repeated together; ‘but if we’d told you then, you might not have gone — and, as you’ve discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.’

— The Phantom Tollbooth

In the startup blogosphere, you’ll regularly see posts about how hard startups are, how hard it is to be an entrepreneur. Mark Suster has an excellent recent entry into the genre, coining the very excellent term Entrepreneurshit. Earlier this summer, Ben Horowitz brought his rapper’s flair to describing The Struggle, a cold and merciless beatdown about a place where nothing is easy and nothing feels right. A few years ago, Paul Graham posted what should have been the definitive piece about What Startups Are Really Like, covering all the high-low points of cofounder conflict, total life immersion, emotional roller coasters, endless persistence, unpredictable customers, clueless investors and heartless luck. But it wasn’t the final word, and it won’t be – why is that?

Dave McClure bends the pattern by noting (blaring, really, in inimitable McClure style) that the passion should be about product, not entrepreneurs. What all the other posts were saying is, Don’t come and try this shite because you think being an entrepreneur is fun, because it’s not. Dave completes the sentence by saying what the passion should really be about: product and customers. It’s a nice continuation of the message to whomever needed to read all the previous entreaties about the pain, the passion, and the not-very-likely glory.

Who exactly are all these posts talking to? To the inexperienced, of course – the battle scarred veterans already know what’s what. But those young tyros, those fresh-off-the-presses CS majors, the hackers, the “design guys,” the would-be world conquerors – all those startup sages want to send a message: think twice before you dive into the deep end of the pool, kiddos. There’s a bit of a concern that an endless horde of former Wall Street DBs will descend upon Silicon Valley, as they have been doing ever since the late ’90s, with their uninformed dreams of being “a startup guy.”

I say, let ’em come. I have no problem with anyone who wants to take the plunge. If you’re even thinking you might want to do it someday, do it now, do it today. I’d rather have you here, facing down those odds, in the Entrepreneurshit, deep in The Struggle, finding out What Startups Are Really Like – rather have you here than constructing a new derivative, grinding it out for the man, toiling away while wondering if this is really all there is to life. Never mind the fact that it’s completely impossible; that’s only true for those who listen to the misguided wisdom of their elders.

house on fire

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p. 86:

When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire.

This was the last lonely night of anticipation for Jay Gatsby. He’d been planning and plotting and building for years, finally purchased a mansion across the water from his love, and found the perfect excuse for reintroduction in his humble neighbor. He lit his house from tower to cellar, wandered the rooms with the eye of a diamond cutter looking to extract brilliance from every corner. He waited and watched for his neighbor to come home so they could finalize the planned day.

Putting everything that you have into the realization of a single dream is a dangerous affair. Even if the dream appears to come true, it inevitably fails to match the fire of anticipation. This is a quiet night in the story, but it’s possibly the best night in Gatsby’s life, the moment when everything he’d dreamed about seemed about to come true.

the busy and the tired

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p. 85:

‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.’

There are homemade aphorisms sprinkled throughout Fitzgerald’s work, often reflecting his view of the world as romantic, ambitious, and exhausting. Most of the world is busy and tired, but everyone wants to be either pursuing or pursued. You must either be consumed by desire or be the object of consuming desire, or else what’s the force of life for?

Fitzgerald believed that each man and woman is born with a limited reserve of fuel, fuel for creativity or romance or commerce or sport, fuel that should be spent in the pursuit of greatness. And he felt that once it was spent, it was gone, unrecoverable and without a revitalizing replacement. He drank himself to death at 44 because he had pursued his whole life, and then he was just tired. We can read this aphorism as a timeline instead of a categorization: youth is pursued, experience pursues, age becomes busy, tiredness becomes death.

universal skepticism

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p 84:

Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm.

That everyone’s life is a story is a comforting thought, even if that comes with the unavoidable truth that not every story is interesting and few stories end in triumph. Less obvious but equally unavoidable is that everyone’s life is part of someone else’s story, if that story is told broadly enough.

What is it like to know that in the great story of your lifetime, you are only the narrator to someone else’s story? Nick and Jordan live their story in the shadow of the towering romance of Daisy and Gatsby. But the smaller story is more universal, and therefore a more relevant cautionary tale of hard love and missed connections. I really enjoy the few passages when Nick pulls out of his absorption with Gatsby to focus on Jordan – their moments are all the more memorable for being small diversions in the taller tale.

purposeless splendor

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p. 83:

He came alive to me, delivered from the womb of his purposeless splendor.

Jordan reveals that there was no coincidence in these sudden neighbors: ‘“Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.” And Nick realizes that Gatsby ‘had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths so that he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.”

This is the moment where Gatsby lost his greatness – not from something he did but because of the realization by others of his purpose. He went from a swirling mass of secrets and rumors, a human Rorschach test, to a man with a shockingly modest plan of grandiose proportion. He is revealed as having made the most extravagantly romantic ploy, delivering him from the greatness of his purposeless splendor. His life can only unravel from here.