[了不起的盖茨比] Mia Wang 的读书笔记

Mia Wang

Day 1-2:

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember
that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
I wanted the world to be in uniform and at
a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with
privileged glimpses into the human heart.

Mia Wang

Day 3 - Chapter 1 -

It was deep summer on road-house roofs and in front of wayside
garages.
The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ
sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The
silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head
to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged
from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands
in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his
leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn
suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share
was his of our local heavens.
Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and
distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that
might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he
had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

Mia Wang

Day 4-6 — Chapter 2 —

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.

Mia Wang

Day 7-10 - Chapter 3 -

My personal favorite scene from The Great Gatsby:
The first time that Nick meet Gatsby

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased.
There was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.
A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

Description of my favorite place to visit on planet - New York City:

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.
At eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I left a sinking in my heart.

“I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”
For a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow thinking
and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew
that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.

Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

Mia Wang

Day 11-15 — Chapter 4 —

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a
constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river
in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory
money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for
the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the
world.
I don’t like mysteries, and I don’t understand why you
won’t come out frankly and tell me what you want.
Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you
know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild,
but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation.
The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and
bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that he
could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.

Mia Wang

Day 16-25 — Chapter 5、6、7—

“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said
Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your
dock.”
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.
“I love New York on summer afternoons when every one’s away. There’s
something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits
were going to fall into your hands.”

Mia Wang

Day 26-38 Week 6 - Chapter 8、9

There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms up-stairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender, but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motorcars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered.
That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters.
I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.
I spent my Saturday nights in New York, because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive.
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
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 orgiastic 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….