The Great Gatsby

that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic
conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means
anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business,
the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented
just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be
likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of
Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other
capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body
lived naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of the bracing
days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became
contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of
the others because they were hysterical about things which in his
overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque
and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of
ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock
ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled