Entry for June 08, 2007

Finally read The Great Gatsby. It's a better novel than I thought, perhaps even a great one.

1. "I'm thirty. I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."
(quote from The Great Gatsby).

2. "
"I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't repeat the past."
"Can't repeat the past? he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"

He looked around him wildly as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

"I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She'll see".
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he coud find out what that thing was..."

(quote from The Great Gatsby).

Men are often more obsessed by the past than women. They think they can repeat the past change everything, and make the future become the past (or better than that). Women, on the other hand, are more easy to accept things as they are now, not as they used to be or should have been.
Anyway, that guy Gatsby makes me think of another guy, Martin Eden, by Jack London. Both of them were naive, determined, obsessed, passionate and optimistic. And they had to pay by their lives for the sophisticated, frivolous, boring and artificial society that they strived hard to become a part of.