from This Side of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald
from Book Two, Chapter One

[Editor's Note: Another unusual post for this blog, which I can't resist posting. And again it's Fitzgerald. And again a scene from the night streets of New York. Either Fitzgerald captures the essence of the New York night so perfectly, or his nocturnal prose especially resonates with me, or both.]

Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his—the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets . . . it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and singing—he moved in a half-dream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager feet from every corner . . . How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkeness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air.

from The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald
from the coda of chapter three

(Editor's Note: Being prose, this isn't a usual post for this blog, but I just had to post this, after reading it last night. Fitzgerald truly has a knack for painting beautiful impressions of the romanticism of both New York and the Jazz Age; and then putting his finger to the wounds which lay within - and which would soon birth themselves. All particularly accentuated by my own anticipated move to New York.)

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 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.