Words, words, words.

Friday, January 16, 2009

When I saw that The Great Gatsby was one of the books we were supposed to read in my Major American Writers class, I was annoyed. I read it in high school, didn't really like it, and dismissed it as "one of those high school books." But now I'm noticing how much depth I missed.


Here's the end of Chapter 6:

"He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...
...One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. 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.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. 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. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something- an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever."

This is brilliant.

In other news, I'm coming home this weekend.

3 comments:

Alison Anderberg said...

I felt the same way in high school... But I may have to give Gatsby another try!

Kenny said...

haha! Thats great!
Unfortunately, I don't think any amount of re-review will ever save the film adaptation of Gatsby... :/

Morgan Miller said...

Hey, this is a good post, but it seems like you post a lot of other really good posts but then when I click on the link they are deleted!

Why do you do this?
Sometimes I feel like those posts resonate with my soul more than anything else.
But then they disappear.

Actually, this one resonates quite well. Gatsby owns all. That book is bittersweet and beautiful and amazing.
I probably should read it again.
I know now what I did not know before, and I shall love my Daisy forevermore.