excerpt - The Great Gatsby

'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. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others - poor young clerks who loitered in front of the windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.'

The above is an internal passage by Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald writes beautifully, and in my arrogant high school years I often failed to grasp much of the beauty in the words I read in my exasperation at having to overanalyze the literary allusions, metaphors, motifs, foreshadowing, etc. I just wanted to read the book without having to endure, chapter after chapter the brutal butchering and decomposition of the work. As beneficial as it ended up being, the means to getting there was awful. So much bullshit in class about the discussion of illumination in one or two points, dragging on and on and on. I really hated English class as much as it was simultaneously the only subject I excelled in. If only they had let us read through the book once on our own, discuss it in the span of a week and read it again. But even that is a terrible idea. Because it is only now, seven years after I first read and dismissed it, I finally see and appreciate the beauty in this story about childish, self-centered, disillusioned, irresponsible adults in their crazy lives, split dangerously between dream and reality, false hopes and expectations and dismay. I suppose it's a lesson in the perils of the American dream, a warning of the fickleness of human beings, the ever-present discrepancy between what is perceived and what actually is; and then there's a glimmer of hope in it, knowing that the only sane and level-headed person is the one recounting the tale.

I think I'll be re-reading all the books I read in high school now. Time to see them once again in a different light.