As every Pingry junior knows, The Great Gatsby is set in the summer of 1922. But one of my favorite passages from that wonderful novel includes the narrator’s recollection of his train rides back to the Midwest for winter break. It is beautifully evocative, with the notes of both exhilaration and wistfulness many of us feel this time of year. So whatever the break holds in store for you, let it include a poignant appreciation for the friends and families we cherish, the memories we hold dear, and the hope that Scott Fitzgerald spies, however distant, of a bright and happy future.

 

“One of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening with a few Chicago friends already caught up into their own holiday gayeties to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This or That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances and the matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of the small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again.”

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chapter IX, pp. 183-184

 

 

 

To contact the author: Mr. Keating