we'd sit for hours

I'm always pleasantly surprised and sort of feel -- rewarded -- somehow, when I notice a quote and I know where they got it from! -- or I think I do, and anyway it's familiar -- it gives you some common understanding with the person who says it, and it's like an "Ah-hah!" moment.

Yesterday on C-Span, for example this guy was talking about defense spending and he told a story right directly out of Fiddler On The Roof -- though he didn't credit the movie (or the play), he called it "the old rabbi story"....so maybe the story existed before Fiddler was written, and they just stuck it in there.

And when listening to Bob Dylan's Love And Theft CD, there's a song called "Summer Days" and he sings,

She's looking in to my eyes, and she's a-holding my hand


She looks in to my eyes, she's holding my hand

She say, "you can't repeat the past,"

I say "You can't? What do you mean you can't?

Of course you can."

-------------- that "repeat the past" part -- right straight out of The Great Gatsby -- (Bob Dylan and I read the same book -- hurrah!  and Ah-hah!)
-------------------[excerpt, The Great Gatsby]----------------Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy's running around alone, for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby's party.  Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of oppressiveness -- it stands out in my memory from Gatsby's other parties that summer....
 
Daisy and Gatsby danced.  I remember being surprised by his graceful, conservative fox-trot -- I had never seen him dance before....
 
Almost the last thing I remember was standing with Daisy and watching the moving picture director and his Star....
 
"I like her," said Daisy.  "I think she's lovely."
 
But the rest offended her -- and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture but an emotion.  She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village -- appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.  She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand....
 
I stayed late that night.  Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had run up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights were extinguished in the guest rooms overhead.  When he came down the steps at last the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face, and his eyes were bright and tired.
 
"She didn't like it," he said immediately.
 
"Of course she did."
 
"She didn't like it," he insisted.  "She didn't have a good time."
He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression.
"I feel far away from her," he said.  "It's hard to make her understand"
 
"You mean about the dance?"
 
"The dance?"  He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers.  "Old sport, the dance is unimportant."
 
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say:  "I never loved you."  After she had obliterated three years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken.  One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house -- just as if it were five years ago.
 
"And she doesn't understand," he said despairingly.  "She used to be able to understand.  We'd sit for hours ---"
 
He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.
 
"I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured.  "You can't repeat the past."
 
"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously.  "Why of course you can!"
 
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
 
"I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly.  "She'll see."
------------------------------------- [end excerpt]
 
{The Great Gatsby.  F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Copyright 1925.  Charles Scribner's Sons.}
 
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