"No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock—until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. 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 old 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 on 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 toward him through the amorphous trees."Not making any claims of analogy or interpretation, only that this is one of many things I thought of last Friday morning.
I think what is so sad about the whole business is the way it foregrounds the essential sadness of the man's life, makes it seem to us that each glittering and wretched move was all the time arranged around some unfulfilled yearning, some lost or never-had thing. It's painfully easy now to see the child forced to be a man, the man so calculating and yet dumbly earnest in his presentation of a child. And, somewhere in there, an astonishing, god-bestowed gift that was somehow swallowed up and made to serve when it should have been served. It becomes pathetic in every sense, and certainly there is pathos here.
But here's what else I'm thinking. I'm thinking that lust comes in myriad forms and not all of them bad. I'm thinking of the shame and joy of the body, of its plasticity. Of horrible, thoughtless jokes I heard in fourth grade and laughed unthinkingly at. Of sheen. That zoos can work two ways and that fatherhood is a sacred charge not to be fucked with. That the American self is a bizarre and fluid and frail construct. Of sweat and ingenuity, of the meaning of the word "synthesizer." That self-love and -loathing can appear so alike as to be impossible to separate. That longing can take many forms. For example: a fedora, a chimp, a blinding white glove. That time really is a function of space. Of flashing legs and neon pavement, of an elastic miracle of a voice, a bassline and a shove. And above all of a human body in perpetual spin, dip, shuck, and jive, at once liquid and mechanical, a cold, coruscating flame alive and still weirdly false with the bliss and, yes, thrill of motion.
