brief, rapt attention

The following selection from The Great Gatsby is one which I copied down, word for word, in a journal when I was 15 or 16. And a couple of years ago when I did some substituting in the high school, I had the opportunity to read the passage aloud to a small group of students.

I had been placed for three weeks in a special study hall class for students who were behind in their work for one reason or another. I was the assistant to the "real" teacher. The kids were plugged into a routine which included some very simple math items -- straightforward multiplication -- as well as vocabulary words. (I think the reason for having some work which seemed to me to be more appropriate for grade school than high school must have been to have the students start their class period by being successful at something, and also to keep them somewhat organized and focused. There were some discipline problems -- the first day I went in, a thin, blonde ninth grade boy picked up a chair, dropped it loudly on the floor and said the f-word. One of those -- "All - right - then" moments.)

One of their brief grammar exercises had a sentence with a reference to "The Great Gatsby" and none of them knew what that was, so I got it from the school library and asked the Teacher's permission to read a couple of paragraphs from it to the students.

She wasn't real psyched, but she let me. (She had her own style. At each class period change, while the students from the last period exited and new ones came in, she would go through a door to the neighboring classroom and talk with the teacher in there, in low, urgent, conspiratorial tones. "Bzzzz-bzzzz-bzzzz." It was like bees, or an electrical problem, or something....)

"We-e-ll -- if you think they'll listen...!" she answered, when I asked her.
I gave them this:

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And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....And one fine morning --

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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[The Great Gatsby,

by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Copyright 1925 by Charles

Scribner's Sons.]

In the time it took me to read that aloud to these high school people, no one complained, yelled, asked to go to the bathroom, threw anything, or said the f-word.

That felt major.

-30-