It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows- it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven.
The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow’s, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath – and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light – light dividing like pearls – forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.
January, the Monday of months...
He kissed her because it came about quite naturally; he found sweetness sleeping still upon her lips, and felt that he had never been away.
As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table – the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.
What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe – why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.
And then, one fairy night, May became June.
People fall in and out of love all the time. I wonder how they manage it.
Their hands touched for an instant, but neither spoke. Silences were becoming more frequent and more delicious.
You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.
With people like us our home is where we are not.
Suddenly he was inside the radius of her perfume and kissing her breathlessly.
He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house.
Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn... No – Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men.
Their eyes met, locked, became wistful, and dreamy and beautiful.
I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way.
The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.
Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss anyone; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind.
There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully – assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.
At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness.