Spex
Date: Mon Jun 15, 2009 10:49 AM GMT
Latayne, I also read The Great Gatsby many years ago, and re-read it last month because Stephanie was horrified that I preferred Revolutionary Road. I definitely got much more out of it this time, and saw the beauty of the writing, but sorry, Yates is still more to my taste!
Latayne C Scott
Date: Thu Jun 11, 2009 01:51 PM GMT
I took a whole class on F. Scott Fitzgerald when I was in my 20's and despite the professor's rhapsodies about how wonderful he was, I didn't agree.
Only now, later in life, when I returned to The Great Gatsby, with its theme of lost opportunities and unrecoverable hopes, did I feel as if I'd read the words of someone who could look inside souls.
(From the ending of Gatsby):
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.
I blogged about it: http://novelmatters.blogspot.com/2009/01/age-at-which-we-read.html
I am a different person than when I first read that, years ago.
And now I think that I shall never recover from those words; the simplicity, the finality, the truthfulness of those words.
Latayne C Scott
www.latayne.com
novelmatters.blogspot.com
