MINUSSIIIXTYSEVEN

Twenty miles from the city a pair of enor-mous eggs, identical in contour and sepa-rated only by a courtesy bay, jut out onto the most domesticate body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals--like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed and flat at the contact end--but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size

A b o u t h a l f w a y b e t w e e n W e s t E g g a n d N e w Y o r k t h e

m o t o r r o a d h a s t i l y j o i n s t h e r a i l r o a d a n d r u n s b e -s i d e i t f o r a q u a r t e r o f a

m i l e , s o a s t o s h r i n k a w a y f r o m a c e r t a i n d e s o l a t e a r e a o f l a n d . T h i s i s a

v a l l e y o f a s h e s - - a f a n t a s -t i c f a r m w h e r e a s h e s g r o w l i k e w h e a t i n t o r i d g e s a n d

h i l l s a n d g r o t e s q u e g a r -d e n s ; w h e r e a s h e s t a k e t h e

f o r m s o f h o u s e s a n d c h i m -n e y s a n d r i s i n g s m o k e a n d ,

f i n a l l y , w i t h a t r a n s c e n d -e n t e f f o r t , o f m e n w h o

m o v e d i m l y a n d a l r e a d y c r u m b l i n g t h r o u g h t h e p o w -

MINUSSIXTYSEVEN

“ N e q u e p o r r o q u i s q u a m e s t q u i d o -l o r e m i p s u m q u i a d o l o r s i t a m e t , c o n s e c t e t u r , a d i p i s c i v e l i t . . . ”“ T h e r e i s n o o n e w h o l o v e s p a i n i t -s e l f , w h o s e e k s a f t e r i t a n d w a n t s t o h a v e i t , s i m p l y b e c a u s e i t i s p a i n . . . ”

D N E M X D N !If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was some-thing gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivi-ty to the promises of life.… [Gatsby had] an extraordinary gift for hope, a roman-tic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

A dinner partyNick Carraway, the narrator, announces that he is writing his account two years after the events described. Aged twenty-nine, in the spring of 1922 he travels East from his midwestern home to work as a bond salesman in New York. He has rented a house on West Egg, sandwiched between the mansions along the shore of Long Island Sound. He knows no-body except his distant cousin Daisy Bucha-nan, who lives with her wealthy husband Tom on East Egg, across the bay.

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