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 anymore,' he told me,' just remember that all the people in
this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'
He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way,
and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve
all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim
of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality
when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of
being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the
confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when
I realized by some unmistakable sign that an 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 judgments is a matter 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 parcelled 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 the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what
it's founded 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