golden age thinking.

this afternoon i fixed myself a martini and sat down to finish the book i was reading, the great gatsby.  i actually never read it in middle school or high school like most people, and felt the time was high for me to read it. 

i have an endless curiosity of the lost generation, of hemingway and gertrude stein, of paris in the jazz age and during the war.  as a lover of literature and writers in general, i dragged PI to the famous literary cafes and the shakespeare & company bookstore, and devoured midnight in paris three times in the theaters [of course it doesn't hurt that we both love woody allen].

anyway - i found gatsby to be an amazingly beautiful novel.  i fell in love with a few lines of fitzgerald's and wanted to share them, of course..

'let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.'

 and the last lines of the novel were absolutely haunting:

'gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year receeds before us.  it eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... and one fine morning --

and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

given gatsby's great obsession with the past, they were of course very fitting.  but sometimes i feel like i have that same nostalgia, that same wish to recreate that which has already happened.  i find it all the time in working on my book, in reading my old journals from my time in prague, in conversations i have with PI.  i want to go back to the time when my life was in it's golden age, when i lived far away, making friends with new people on 'the continent' and i never wanted it to end. 

on that note... a little woody allen dialogue on nostalgia.

 til next time...

:)