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—-
***
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”***
From where she sat she could see the river and many boats on it. At first she used to think that so many different kinds of boats on one river in one place was just a dream. All of them beautiful, all of them pretty against the sparkling blue water. White sailboats against the summer sky in the horizon, huge cruise ships returning at dusk, even flat barges carrying garbage that glinted in the sun.
The squalor and the morbidity of the rest of the city, nay the rest of the world seemed far away, hidden behind razor sharp shiny buildings as though the dust and the shabbiness was sifted away by some invisible hand towards the periphery of this glorious center of the world. She knew those other places could be reached via long train rides through dark tunnels and when the subway emerged out of the ground, it was another world. Continue reading Boats
