the elusive, lurking past

 

The Great Gatsby Painting, by Reem Khader

------------------ [excerpt] ------------- "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. ---------------------- [end / excerpt]

I was thinking of this passage from The Great Gatsby, while listening to Ukraine news - someone said Putin's goal is to put the old Russian Empire back together.

"You can't repeat the past."

Another news-video on You Tube that helps enlighten us on the war situation:

'Picking them off':  Petraeus explains how Ukrainians are taking out Russian generals

uploader:  CNN

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[from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner's.  1925.]

        "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."

        He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.  His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was... .

        ... One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight.  They stopped here and turned toward each other.  

Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year.  The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars.

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