On the Death of Mr. Addison (1721), line 81. Compare: "He who should teach men to die, would at the same time teach them to live", Michel de Montaigne, Essay, book i. chap. ix.; "I have taught you, my dear flock, for above thirty years how to live; and I will show you in a very short time how to die", Sandys, Anglorum Speculum, p. 903; "Teach him how to live, And, oh still harder lesson! how to die", Beilby Porteus, Death, line 316; "He taught them how to live and how to die", Somerville, In Memory of the Rev. Mr. Moore. Context: There patient show'd us the wise course to steer,A candid censor, and a friend severe;There taught us how to live; and (oh! too high
The price for knowledge) taught us how to die.
He might have despised himself, for [Gatsby] had certainly taken her under false pretenses . . . he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself—that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities—he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.
Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.
Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something . . . ‘They’re a rotten crowd,’ I shouted . . . ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’ I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.
I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.
[P]erhaps [Gatsby] no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.
Did you know you can highlight text to take a note? x
He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8. Nick imagines what Gatsby must have been feeling when George Wilson shot him as he lay on an air mattress in his pool. He tries to imagine what it was like for Gatsby to have lost his dream – the American Dream and Daisy who was a major part of it. The symbolism of the flower suggests that Gatsby felt disillusioned with Daisy and she was not a worthy object of his worship. The ‘ashen’ figure is George Wilson, the character most closely associated with the Valley of Ashes.