The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

4/5 rating. 189 pages.

Book #68 of 2020. Read September 29, 2020.

This classic book of excess, unrequited love, and loss is really in two parts: the first being very slow, boring, and all about the over-the-top extravagance surrounding the narrator, and the second half showing why this deserves the title of a “classic”

Fitzgerald managed to write a present-day (in 1925) Greek tragedy. I think this book speaks to so many people because of our inherent clinging to the past and those people we have lost. Gatsby’s absolute infatuation with his first love fuels him to remake his life and become successful so he can afford to take care of her. As tragedies strike, both of them realize it’s too late. Though they pine for their past lives, we all move forward, and it is so often impossible for reality to live up to the stories we have rewritten about the past.

“But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.”

Sadly, for Gatsby, the many different affairs surrounding him finally come to bear at the end of a black barrel. Gatsby pays for his love and devotion, in the most tragic way, as nearly no one comes to his funeral: going from the extravagant parties he threw, to utter loneliness.

“‘Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds…The poor son-of-a-bitch,’ he said.”

It’s hard to pull out anything positive from tragedies, but I think classic books are meant to teach us what we can miss. Don’t let life pass you by while holding out for things and people of the past; our lives are meant to be lived in the moment, and we can only look forward.

Quotes:

“‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.’”

“We heard it from three people so it must be true.”

“I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.”

“He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

“Anyhow he gives large parties…And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

“Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues…”

“All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change and excitement was generating on the air.”

“It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.”

“I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”

“‘Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,’ he suggested.”

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….”

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