So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Last night, my very own son #2, Jack the Lad, brought me his worn copy of that smash hit, The Great Gatsby, and directed my attention to the final page. Eyes shining with the dewy dawn of a new found delight in literature, he assured me that it contained, "The Perfect Sentence" and insisted that I read the whole page.
I did. Then, I read it again.
I still can't figure out which perfect sentence The Lad was referring to because, by my count, there are no fewer than fifteen sentences and every single one of them is better than the other. Here they are.
I did. Then, I read it again.
I still can't figure out which perfect sentence The Lad was referring to because, by my count, there are no fewer than fifteen sentences and every single one of them is better than the other. Here they are.
"I spent my Saturday nights in
New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so
vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and
incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night
I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps.
But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at
the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.
On the last night, with my
trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge
incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word,
scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight,
and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered
down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.
Most of the big shore places
were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving
glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the
inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old
island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast
of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s
house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human
dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the
presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he
neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with
something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding
on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked
out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this
blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to
grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in
that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic
rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green
light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us
then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms
farther. . . . And one fine morning ——
So we beat on, boats against
the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
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