Can we ever escape - do we even really wish to escape - our own green lights flashing across the bay of memory, across the sound of time?
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.
The too obstrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.
They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts, even from our pity.
The rhythm of the year, summing up and sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.
It took me - at least - half my life to pick up and read such a slim volume, but now I find myself entranced by the clarity, craftsmanship and compassion permeating The Great Gatsby.
Not over-impressed by the 1974 film; Gatsby (Robert Redford), Tom and Nick all convincing to a greater or lesser degree, but Mia Farrow not quite Daisy somehow, and while much of the dialogue stays faithful to the book, the invented love scenes add little, and even detract from the understated emotional and sexual tension that Scott Fitzgerald could create obliquely and thereby charge electrically.