A Gatsby Project

[girlandgeese]

Note to self

Stop thinking: “I’m not talented enough to execute this concept.” Start thinking: “I’m going to be a stronger artist when I’ve finished this piece.”

[404youbroketheinternet]

This is a fixed mindset vs. a growth mindset.

Your abilities are not static, and any challenges you have, anything that turns out different from how you imagined, is not evidence of failure, just a struggle towards improvement.

[st-pam]

[hungwy]

Alright team, lets bust a nut out there

[paypigbi]

i’m a paypig

mistress told me to send money to people because i don’t deserve it

ill pick a few people who reblog this post to send 1000€, i’ll post proof later today

[deejay]

Relog if you need this energy

source

[theryanproject]

[slimdaddymbaku]

Just one of these checks could change my life ,

[jehovahhthickness]

You win $430 million tomorrow, wyd?

[lexxgotthejuice]

Not telling anybody.

[grandpaq]

Ask my mama to take me to McDonald’s and just wait for it….

[asia-divine]

Mom: Do you have McDonald’s mon…

[lenatheninjax3]

😂😂😂 the Rihanna gif

[magical-flying-moron]

this is the money Rihanna, reblog to have someone throw money at you

[gotinstarblog-deactivated201512]

[half-black-phillip]

I’m so mad because this worked

[britney2007spears]

help me roger

[telanu]

Reblogging myself because

Originally posted by gifs-for-the-masses

[luthienebonyx]

Reblogging myself because… what was that? Five minutes?

O_O

[riskpig]

………my friend has made me curious

[maryburgers]

help me roger

[maryburgers]

Update: after I reblogged this someone messaged me offering me tickets to the sold out Hausu screening with a Q&A and autograph session with the director

[zombbeans]

These never work for me, but here’s to trying.

[strangenewclassrooms]

I don’t believe in these things

But last time I reblogged one ten/fifteen minutes later I got a call offering me a job

But I reblogged it because I was waiting on hearing back from the job. So there you go.

Roger is cute.

[sugared-violets]

Eh Roger is cute I might as well

[secondlina]

That fish is so happy it makes me happy.

[cinnappo]

Reblogging myself because I reblogged this yesterday and got promoted today!

[californiakingme]

Why not. Do me a solid Roger

[maryburgers]

roger it’s time. i hope i have not asked for too much from you but you know what i want.

[thesqhq-blog]

C’mon Roger. I need you.

[growlift-deactivated20161002]

Help me get mew

[lauraannegilman]

a) Roger is a cutie.

b) someone who reblogs this might positive-think themselves into something wonderful even without Roger’s help.

[taraljc]

I will never doubt Roger again. After I reblogged him, a box with two Integrity dolls I’d ordered back in OCTOBER that the USPS had lost was delivered yesterday.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

I believe in Roger!

[menifee901-deactivated20170704]

Bring that ass here boi!

[thenoirsextherapist-deactivated]

This  needs to be  true  I need some  good news  

[brianttran-deactivated20120224]

Reblog or your mom will die in 928 seconds.

[ovod0se]

I love my mom.

I am risking nothing

I AM SORRY FOLLOWERS, I LOVE MY MOMMY

Will not risk.

sorry followers :(

[whatgracelikes-deactivated20190]

omg im so glad to se so many people love their mummy

[ameriagrae]

Why’re you being mean to my mum?

[larryismyhallelujah-blog]

goddamn it

[lollie-pond-deactivated20150728]

Nope. Googled it. 15 minuets. Nope. Not taking any chances

[steampoweredplayer]

Koop

[twirliest]

This has 1.2 million reblogs … Ps not riskin it

[nathanvj]

1.4 almost ps not risking it

[queenprotein-deactivated2016012]

Fuck this post

[i-likethesummer-rain]

2.5 million notes I hate myself

[froot-lupul]

I reblogged this twice now

[insidethe99-blog]

I’m so sorry this isn’t b99 related and this isn’t real but I can’t not skip this I’m sorry

[mayannaise-hart-deactivated2021]

Not taking a fucking chance

[lethamber]

Sorry, guys, but Im not taking a chance

[celestialkeyprincess]

No chances… She’s out… And she must be protected.

[bitchwithwifivevo]

How dare you

[riarkling]

Whatcha doin to me Farkle!

[chillyclarke-deactivated2018010]

i can’t risk it

sorry babes my moms just my favorite person ever

[prettylittleliarsfan901-deactiv]

Sorry I can’t risk it

[missprincessdancingsunshine]

Fuck sorry guys  I love my mom

[incoherentlyblogging]

Omg I hate these things but I am paranoid. So sorry guys.

[feels-ships-lunars]

2.8 million notes

CANT RISK IT

[trapbvby]

Sorry guys

[desolves]

sorry 😩

[mexicanthighs-deactivated201605]

IM NOT RISKING IT

[pursuit43]

I hate you sometimes tumblr, but I love my mom

[kuttithevangu]

One of my favorite pieces of folklore is the one that says while babies are gestating an angel comes and teaches them the entire torah. And then at nine months or so the angel KARATE-CHOPS THEM IN THE FACE, thereby punting them out of the womb screaming, and they forget everything they learned

That’s why we have a dent underneath our noses

Why go to all the trouble of teaching babies things and then karate-chopping their memory into oblivion?

So they have to spend their whole life looking around at the world EXTRA HARD in order to get rid of the feeling that they’ve forgotten something important

Jewish folktales… Am I right

[kuttithevangu]

[sovereign of the universe voice] yes, and you, that angel there, your task is to prenatally punch my people in the face, so that they may know hypervigilance

[mazelt0v]

exams would never be scheduled on christmas. no important sporting event would ever be played on easter. it’s about time that jewish holy days are given the same respect.

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

Exactly.

I should add that this isn’t limited to us Jews, either. In the past two years or so, both the Olympics and and the World Cup coincided with Ramadan, and a lot of Muslim athletes were left in the really shitty position of having to choose between either not fasting or putting their athletic performance at risk. If Christians had a fasting month, you bet your ass no sporting events would take place until it was over.

[votedami]

I am here for the Religious Solidarity movements.

[blogdogz]

pure talent

[gatsbyproject]

CHAPTER I--Hour Two

when it reached the house drifting up  the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

      He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body--he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage--a cruel body.

     His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch od paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked--and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

      "Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society and while we were never intimate, I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

     We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

     "I've for a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

     Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acreof deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

     "It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."

     We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling--and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

     The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

     The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her shin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it--indeed I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

     The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise--she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression--the she laughed, and absurd, charming little laugh, andI laughed too and came forward into the room.

     "I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

     She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

     At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipper her head back again--the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

   I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows ip and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth--but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had come gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

     I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love though me.

     "Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.

     "The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel pained plack as a mourning wreath and theres a persistent wail all night along the North Shore."

     "How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby."

     "I'd like to."

     "She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

     "Never."

     "Well, you ought to see her. She's------"

     Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

     "What you doing, Nick?"

     "I'm a bond man. "

     "With who?"

     I told him.

     "Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

     This annoyed me.       "You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."

     "Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me as if he were altert for something more. "I'd be a God Damn fool to live anywhere else."

     At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started-- it was the first word she had uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it sis me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

     "I'm stiff," she complained. "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember."

     "Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon."

     "No thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training."

     Her host looked at her incredulously.

     "You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."

     I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl with an erect carriage which che accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

     "You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there."

     "I don't know a single------"

     "You must know Gatsby."

     "Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

     Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

     Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

     "Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly " Do you always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

[gatsbyproject]

CHAPTER I -- Hour One

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

     "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me,

"just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

Intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon-- for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions  Reserving judgements is a metter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if i forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

     And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or in the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't vere what it's counded on. when I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignifies under the name of the "creative temperament"-- it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

      My family have been prominent  well-to-so people in this middle -western city for three generations. the Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleugh, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

      I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him--with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counterraid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instad of being the warm center of the world the middle west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so i supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a pre-school for me and finally said "Why--ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

     The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

     It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived that I, stopped me on the road.

     "how do you get to West Egg Village?" he asked helplessly.

     I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

     And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees--just as things grow in fast movies--I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

     There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pilled down or out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stoof on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shinning secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mæcenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college--one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"--and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists  the "well rounded" man. This isn't just an epigram--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

     It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among natural curiosities  two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Wester Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of the Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals,--like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end--but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity is every particular except shape and size.

     I lived in West Egg, the--well, the less fahsionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between the two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard--it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel se Ville in Normandy, whith a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Garsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a very small eye-sore and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn and the consoling proximity of millionaires--all for eighty dollars a month.

     Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

     Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven--a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty one that everything afterwards savors of anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy--even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach--but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away:for instance he brought down a string of polo ponies form Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that. 

     Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone  but I didn't believe it--I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

     And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate that I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front foor for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun dials and brick walks and burning gardens--finally

[gatsbyproject]

The Great Gatsby

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

     If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

     I must have you!"

  ONCE AGAIN

TO

ZELDA

[gatsbyproject]

Introductions

In an ill-advised attempt to improve as a writer I've decided to type for you, gentle reader, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.