Mrs Calloway > Recent Status Updates

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 – tomorrow 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.

… 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.

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…

…for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an asthetic 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 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;…

Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the end of the Earth and didn’t know that the party was over.

I shook hands with him; it seems silly not to, but I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. 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…

One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead of me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out a little from his body as if to fight of interference, his head moving sharply here and there, adapting itself to his restless eyes.

…“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.”
She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guest. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.”
…

…In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house – the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.

I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon…

But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.

He pointed out every detail [in the photograph of the house] to me eagerly. “Look there!” and then sort admiration from my eyes. He had shown it so often that I think it was more real to him now than the house itself.

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

…one gentlemen to whom I telephone implied that he had got what he deserved. However, that was my fault for he was one of those who used to sneer most beautiful at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor, and I should have known better than to call him.

“If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man…He’d of helped build the country.”

[Mr Gatz] had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendour of the hall and the great rooms opening out from it into other rooms, his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride.

… as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak, our upon our, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested – interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end.

The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of a compass, a thin red circle in the water.
It was after we started with Gatsby towards the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.
{an interested foreshadowing with “holocaust”}

… He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing arose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towards him through the amorphous trees.

I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe [the phone call] would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must’ve felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream…

Someone, kind or curious, took her in his car and drove her in the wake of her sister’s body.

“Good-bye,” I called. “I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby.” {breaking the fast; his illusions of the world}

“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.

…over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. 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.

… where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.

He left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found her – that he was leaving her behind.

Just as Daisy’s house had always seemed to hear more mysterious and gay than other houses, so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.