Collaborative Close Reading

Mter searching for it uselessly in the taste of earth, in the perfumed letters from Pietro Crespi, in the tempestuous bed of her husband; she had found peace in that house where memories mate-rialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself He was a son of God-a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that-and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end

The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing

tor and his Star. They were still under the white-plum tree and their faces were touching except for a pale, thin ray of moon-light between. It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek. "I like her," said Daisy, "I think she's lovely."

It was dark here in front; only the bright door sent ten square feet of light volleying out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, that rouged and powdered in an invisible glass.

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: "I never loved you." After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be mar-ried from her house-just as if it were five years ago.

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.

Through all he said, even through his appalling senti-mentality, 1 was reminded of something-an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that 1 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 1 had almost remem-bered was un communicable forever.

A short time later, when ~e carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the wm-dow they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by

Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the Sound. 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

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher-shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue.

I walked out the back way-just as Gatsby had when he had made his nervous circuit of the house half an hour before-and ran for a huge black knotted tree, whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain. Once more it was pouring, and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by Gatsby's gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric marshes.

Aware of the loud beating of my own heart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before any words came through

Under the dripping bare lilac-trees a large open car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped side-ways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic smile.

Then the aluminum glow of dawn disappeared and he saw himself again in short pants, wearing a tie around his neck, and he saw his father leading him into the tent on a splendid after-noon, and he saw the ice

Gabriel Garcia Marquez not be grasped. On occasion they were so natural that he identified them as premonitions only after they had been fulfilled. Frequently they were nothing but ordinary bits of superstition.

The houses, painted blue, then painted red, had ended up with an indefinable coloration. "What did you expect?" Ursula sighed. "Time passes." "That's how it goes," Aureliano admitted, "but not so much." In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation.

e passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the fa<rade of Fifty-ninth Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park. Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tight-ening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face.

He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.

It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger-with a cricket bat in his hand. Then it was all true

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them-with his smile. The smile comprehended Montene-gro's troubled history and sympathized with the brave strug-gles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this trib-ute from Montenegro's warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazine

I'd seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that re~ourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American~that comes, 1 suppose, with the absence of lift-ing work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was· always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known

You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't to drive at all." "I am careful." "No, you're not." "Well, other people are," she said lightly. "What's that got to do with it?" "They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an acciden t."

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's hou

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York-every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulp-less halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of rwo hundred oranges in half an hour if a

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the cham-pagne and the stars.

...

Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. 'Til say it whenever 1 want to! Daisy! Dai--" Making a short deft movement, 'I(JIll Buchanan hroke her nose with his open hand. Then there were bloody towels upon the hathroolll Hoor, and women's voices scolding, and high ovcr the confusion a long broken wail of pain. Mr. McKee awoke frOIll his doze and started in a daze toward the door. When he had gone halfWay he turned around and stared at the scene-his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch, bleeding flu-ently, and trying to spread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of Versailles.

assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed ro be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

he sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when 1 asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel

he apartment was on the top floor-a small living-room, a small dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapes-tried furniture entirely too large for it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes ofladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itself into a bonnet, and the countenance of a stou t old lady beamed down into the room

At the news-stand she bought a copy of Town 7iut/e and a moving-picture magazine, and in the station drug-store some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Up-stairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away bd()re shl' selected a new one, lavender-colored with gray upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the front glass

The eyes of Doctor T. ]. Eckleburg ;Ire blue and gigantic-their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yel-luw spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose.

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roo£~ and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a per-sistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.

This is a valley of ashes-a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gar-dens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the pow-dery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invis-ible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-Gatsby, who rep-resented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unhroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises oflife, as ifhe were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

"From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white--" "Did you give Nick a little heart-to-heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing YOll know--" "Don't believe everything you he

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose.

They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening, too, would be over and casually put away. It was sharply dif-ferent from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close, in a continually disap-pointed anticipation Of dse in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright pas-sionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

t was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. "How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly. [ told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him-with special reference to the rather hard-boiled paint-ing that hangs in father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a cenrury after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thor-oughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe-so I decided to go East and learn the bond business.

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snob-bishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

requently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon;

Viennese furniture, the Bohemian crystal, the table service [rom ,the Indies Company, the tablccloUls u'om Holland, and a rich variety or lamps and candle-sticks, hangings and drapes.

Gabriel Garefn .:Marquez in his dress that in spite of the sulTocating heat he would work in his brocade vest and heavy coat of dark cloth. Soaked in sweat, keep-ing a reverent distance from the owners of the house, he spent sev-eral weeks shut up in the parlor with a dedication much like that of Aurcliano in his si1vcrwork.

rhey were wondrous clocks made of carved wood, which the Arabs had traded for macaws and whiehJosi: Arcadio Buendia had synchronized witl1 such precision that every half hour tl1e town grew merry with the progressive chords of the same so~g until it reached the climax of a noontime that was as exact and unanimous as a COfTIw plete waltz.

Ursula had not ~aught up with the gypsies, but she had found the route that her husband had been unable to dis-cover in his frustrated search for the great invenlions

Anxious for solitude, bitten by a virulent rancor against the world, one night he left his bed as usual, but he did not go to Pilar Ternera's house, but to mingle in the tumult of the fair.

gypsies returned. They were the same acrobats and jugglers that had brought the ice. Unlike Melquiades' tribe, they had shown ve,y quickly that

"Dog shit."

One night, as UrsuJa went into the room where he was undressing to go to bed, she relt a mingled sense or shame and pity: he was the first man that she had seen naked arter her husband, and he was so well-equipped ror lirc that he seemed abnormal. Ursula, pregnant for the third time, relived her newlywed lerror.

hen he gave himself over to tl,at hand, and in a terrible state of exhaustion he let himself be led to a shapeless place where his clothes were taken 01T and he was heaved about like a sack of potalOes and thrown from onc side to the other in a bottomless darkness in which his arms were useless, where it no longer smelled of woman but of ammonia, and where he tried to remember her face and found before hjm the face of Ursula, con-fusedly aware that he was doing something that for a very long time he had wanted to do but tl,at he had imagined could really never be done, not knowing what he was doing because he did not know where his reet were or where his head was, or whose feet or whose head, and feeling that he could no longer resist the glacial rumbling of his kidneys and the air or his inlestines, and fear, and the bewil-dered anxiety to Ace and at the same time stay forever in that exas-perated silence and tl,at fearful solitud

as an enormOliS Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered witll an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole struc-ture seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. Inside, where the expediLionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers.

"Not at aJl," Mc!quiades corrected her. "It has been proven that the devil has sulphuric properties and this is just a little corrosive sublimate."

He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws tJying to emerge, and even objects that had been lOSl for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in tur-bulent confusion behind Melquiadcs' magical irons.

a bed of polished stones, which were white and enor-mous, like prchistOl;c eggs. The world was so recent lhat many things lacked names, and in order to inrucatc them it was nccessaty to point.

J\1ANY YEARS LATER, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his Hlther look him to discover icc. At that Lime Macondo

"cre-ates" the text by deciding which of its features are relevant or significant.