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The View from West Egg -- 01.04.08
 
Being totally honest with people is probably the best way to make them HATE you. So why is honesty the best policy? Who knows, but I think I�m ready to have people hate me for my brutal honesty. Maybe because I know love can be faked, and it�s hard to fake hating someone. Anyone can pretend to love someone, but hating them... that�s takes actual passion.

I love some of the lines in �The Great Gastby� because they are so perfectly minimalistic, and because they strike a cord in my life. I�ll be peppering this entry with some of my favorite quotes from the book in order to make my point.

�Gastby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.�

It�s terrible to realize that a moment passed might be your last great chance at something wonderful. It�s terrible to realize it 20 years after it happened, but it is much more horrific to realize it when it happens. The former allows for time between the event and the epiphany. Time enough to perhaps mitigate the effects. But the ladder allows no such mollification. It does allow for the healing to begin sooner rather than later. It is OK though, isn�t it? Wishing for happiness is not a terrible thing to wish for, but it sure does seem to be an outlandish request. It must be too much to ask for.

�His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy�s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips� touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.�

My god man... the word �unutterable� just struck me to be the perfect way of describing the yearning we all must feel for something beyond ourselves. We stand so close but already too far away to grasp it... our reach far exceeding our grasp.

�....I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out Daisy's light at the end of his dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.�

What all the loss I've had to deal with in my life has taught me is that, �Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning---
so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.�

End Communication.

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