Our writing instructor tells us that it's valuable, when you encounter a piece of prose that you find to be especially beautiful or memorable, just to write it down, longhand, in a notebook. The idea is that by writing it down you're being forced to pay attention to it; to think about why you find it beautiful or memorable. You're studying and thinking about the construction of the sentences, the choice of words, the ideas that are being expressed and how they're being expressed, and you're (hopefully) learning from your observations. I haven't been following his advice as often as I should, but when I have I've found it to be a productive exercise.
So, here's a passage, lovely and elegiac, one that I've read time and again and wrote down the other day, from The Great Gatsby. The best thing I can say about it is that every time I walk through the great waiting room at Union Station in Chicago -- a place I've walked through with many different people in many different circumstances over the course of 30 plus years -- I think of it, and Gatsby, and Nick Carraway, and the myriad of comings and goings, the innumerable greetings and goodbyes, that have happened there over time. Not bad.
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 good-by. 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 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.
That's my Middle West--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
