p: 8:

He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

Newly settled in at West Egg, Nick feels lonely until another man, more lost than he, asks for directions and Nick answers easily. And that’s it, that’s all it takes not to be the new guy anymore. This is a powerful idea, that you are lost until you can provide guidance to one more lost than you. I don’t think Fitzgerald meant it in a particularly spiritual or compassionate way, but it’s always struck me as something that’s important to remember in this light: the helplessness of others is an unintended gift to you, and you fail to avail yourself of this bounty if you do not give the best of what you have.

The only other phrase on this page that comes close for me is the way Nick’s new books on finance “stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint.” I often think of the books on my shelf the same way, not just the ones on finance, but all of them – treasures that flash and gleam underneath their dusty spines, needing only their covers to be opened to reveal their endless reward.

p. 7:

I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.

Nick nonchalantly mentions that he was a soldier in the Great War – which was only called World War I later, when the world realized there was a World War II. Half a sentence, that’s all that we hear about his participation in the largest armed conflict mankind had ever seen. And then he spouts this offhand line about his time in Europe and the dislocation he felt on returning home.

This is one of the few lines I enjoy fully only for knowing something about Fitzgerald’s life. It was one of his great puerile regrets that he never fought in the war. I forget why this undesired fortune befell him – maybe it was just timing, he was still in basic training, or possibly he developed some medical condition that kept him stateside. But he was always envious of men who went to war and were therefore more manly, more worldly. So while it’s possible that this sentence is a fine encapsulation of gently repressed post-traumatic stress, authentically felt by actual veterans of the time – it’s more likely that it’s a romantic projection of how Fitzgerald imagines he would have felt had he actually gone to hell and come back a better man for it.

If not for the biographical enjoyment, I would have picked “the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” Beautiful.

p. 6:

personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures

A great example of distilling the essence of a complex human notion into a handful of words. What is personality, what does it mean, how is it understood and displayed and hidden? Fitzgerald defines it in five words, a beautiful turn of phrase.

This page is just crushingly full of other candidates –

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
“a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth”
“I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”
“an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”
“what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams”

Any one of these would have been the jewel of a million other books, but this is just on the second page!

p. 5:

I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

What I love foremost about Fitzgerald’s writing is his unaccountable ability to turn a gorgeous phrase, the way he can string words together in unexpected ways to make a perfect description that you didn’t know could exist before you saw it but you can’t forget once you have. But this is an example of another of his characteristic gifts, his ability to see into the hearts of men, their beliefs about themselves which they use for cover and justification.

Ironically, this is Nick’s first judgment in the book, his explanation for why he’s an observer, merely a repository for the secrets of wilder men. It’s a disclaimer and excuse but not an abdication of his moral core, because it’s also an implicit promise to pass judgment at the end. He reserves judgment but it’s going to come eventually, and all along the way he pitilessly collects the incidents and details that will inform his opinion.

All right, here’s how I’m going to start out on this blog. Every post will be about a single page of The Great Gatsby, and will discuss my favorite phrase or sentence on that page, as little as two words but not longer than an entire sentence. If the page is especially chock full o’ goodness, I may discuss alternatives, but I’ll still pick a favorite.

I’ll be working from the paperback First Collier Books Edition, 1992. The text of the novel runs from page 5 to 189.