the way of ginsu
p. 28:
There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.
For some reason the routine pause turns chance into inevitability – there’s something I always liked about this. Reminds me of one of the persistent themes of Paul Auster‘s writings, that life is formed by chance, and in a sense chance is the illusory veil of fate.
p. 27:
This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
This famous description of the bleak landscape between Manhattan and Kings Point is interesting to me in that I don’t know which is the metaphor, the ashes or the buildings and people. Today that stretch of land is surely overbuilt suburbia, but was it actually fields of ashes in the 1920s? Fitzgerald might be describing a desolate field of windswept ashes and noting the fanciful forms of humanity they take. Or he may be saying that he looks at the gray houses and gray men who live in this purgatory and thinks they have the substance and permanence of ashes swirling in the wind. I suppose the meaning is the same either way.
p. 26:
When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
If you’ve ever stood in the night alone, you’ve heard how relative quiet can be more than silence, and this turn of phrase captures it precisely. Only a few lines on this page, and this phrase is the one that sticks with me. I’m capturing the phrases and sentences that stay with me for the resonance of the writing, but the first chapter ends here with a classic image I have to cite: Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. One of the most famous bits of symbolism in all of literature, the green light representing the dream, the girl, the distance between ambition and class. When he wrote it, did Fitzgerald realize this was to become the legendary totem that it did?
p. 25:
Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
Possibly one of my favorite phrases in the entire novel – his peremptory heart – hearkens back to one of my favorite poems, surely one that Fitzgerald admired as well: Ozymandias, the king of kings whose boast of immortality was carved on the rubble strewn beside the sands of his former kingdom, also had a “heart that fed” – insatiable, demanding, dictatorial heart.
This same page contains a flurry of beautiful phrases, as Fitzgerald cruises to the end of the chapter like a commanding boxer ending a round with a hail of lovely glovework. It’s possible though perhaps overreaching to find the reference to Ozymandias and see that Fitzgerald himself is the king of kings, littering the page with the jewels of his talent, destined to become forgotten and lost in the sands of time.
p. 24:
They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light.
A minor example of good writing, an evocative turn of phrase. But given all that’s gone on during the evening, the classic picture of the host couple bidding farewell to their departing guest almost insists on a sinister subtext. That square of light, framing Daisy and Tom, shows their outline without shedding any illumination on their turmoil.
p. 23:
pleasing contemptuous expression
A photo of Jordan captures this expression, her face contemptuous with her youth and virtuosity, and pleasing rather than off-putting for that contempt. It’s very curious and deep when you think about it: What does the observer believe about himself to find attraction in contempt?
p. 22:
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said.
We’ve all met someone like this, someone who is so compelling, convincing, captivating in person. In a one-on-one conversation, these people exude a magic circle of belief – they are not exactly deceiving you, but they create their own limited reality with the force of their personality. And then they turn it off, like a switch, you turn away, the world comes seeping into the circle and you realize the basic insincerity of that temporary reality.
p. 21:
‘And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’
Now this is interesting. Daisy said this – or says she said this – at the birth of her nameless little girl. It’s kind of a proto-feminist’s lament, that society is rigged to limit any meaningful goals for women, so they’re reduced to having their happiness depend on men, who are destined to disappoint them. So the best thing is to be beautiful enough to attract the best man, and foolish enough to be blissfully ignorant of his failings.
Daisy says it to Nick, and maybe she means it, but what she really revels in is the cynical sophistication of her saying it. She doesn’t care about women’s rights, she barely cares about her daughter in this moment – what she cares about is her trying on this attitude like this season’s latest fashion.
p. 20:
Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone and yet to avoid all eyes.
A pleasant social dinner dissipates in the tension between a man and woman silently waging war over the uninvited guest who isn’t there. When you’re sitting at the table as a peaceful noncombatant, you want to meet everyone’s gaze with a fair and level look in return, but it’s too painful to look anyone in the eyes because that’s what they want too, and everyone’s faking it. Have you been there?
Quite a few small phrases on this page stick in my head: Daisy’s “tense gayety” on returning to the dinner table from a clenched discussion with Tom, the “shrill metallic urgency” of the phone that wouldn’t stop ringing, the way Tom and Jordan stroll back to the house with “several feet of twilight between them.”
p. 19:
I am not even faintly like a rose.
This phrase is not lyrical, it’s not magical, it’s not the typical language love case for me. It’s just that this is the most deliberate attempt at humor in the whole novel, a dry sardonic humor very much like the fashionable postmodern irony of today. I just like the way it sounds in Nick’s narration, and it sticks in my head.
The other phrase I like on this page comes when Nick and Jordan “exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning” when Daisy ran into the house to argue quietly with Tom over the dinnertime phone calls from his girl. I know just what it feels like to get and to give such a glance, and you’ll recognize it in this phrase.
ginsudo 