Can't retweet the past?

Over the last two months, I serialized The Great Gatsby via Twitter on behalf of the American Repertory Theater. That's The Great Gatsby, the whole novel, in 140 character chunks. This was a promotion for the ART's production of Gatz - about which you can read my thoughts here - but it quickly became a labor of love.

Reducing classic literature into tweets sounds like just that - a reduction. But working with the text of Gatsby on such a minute and superficial level gave me a whole new appreciation for the jewel-like perfection of the language. Every sentence, every phrase tells an entire story. It is beyond masterful.

The followers of the @ARTGatz feed realized this as well, and I especially enjoyed seeing which lines they would re-tweet to their own followers. Some were predictable favorites - others were a bit more mysterious. I eventually collected every @ARTGatz re-tweet here, creating a sort of absurdist Gatsby micro-narrative. It's the world's first crowd-sourced abridgment. Enjoy.

THE GREAT GATSBY (abridged)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Crowd-sourced via the followers of @ARTGatz

Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

(I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

It was nine o’clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten.

—signed Jay Gatsby, in a majestic hand.

She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses.

“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, & then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.

It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself...

Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene.

“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

...a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I've ever known.

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.

“I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons.” I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now.

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute. “He just saw the opportunity.”

The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime...

...and peering toward the bleared windows from time to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were taking place outside.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with gusts of emotion.

“Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.

—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue.

Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds.

“It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before."

“You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.

...and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.

they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

—mostly I was in New York, trotting around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself with her senile aunt—

“I know your wife,” continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.

By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

“Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie together.” A breeze stirred the gray haze of Daisy’s fur collar.

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper...

...bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again.

...and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.

“She didn’t like it,” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.” He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression.

“The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself, that had gone into loving Daisy.

—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.

“Hot!” said the conductor to familiar faces. “Some weather! hot! hot! hot! Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?”

That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!

“It seems pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun—or wait a minute—it’s just the opposite—the sun’s getting colder every year."

“What will we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of——” I hesitated.

A pause followed this apparently pointless remark.

“Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?” inquired Jordan humorously. “What?” Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. “A medium?”

“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”

We were all irritable now with the fading ale, and aware of it we drove for a while in silence.

Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s faded eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby’s caution about gasoline.

“We’ve got enough to get to town,” said Tom. But there’s a garage here,” objected Jordan. “I don’t want to get stalled in this baking heat.”

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic.

“We’re getting old,” said Daisy. “If we were young we’d rise and dance.” “Remember Biloxi,” Jordan warned her. “Where did you know him, Tom?”

Jordan smiled. “He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president of your class at Yale.”

“Open the whiskey, Tom,” she ordered, “and I’ll make you a mint julep. Then you won’t seem so stupid to yourself. . . .

Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

"But both of us loved each other all that time, old sport, and you didn’t know. I used to laugh sometimes."

...and in my heart I love her all the time.”

She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.”

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

It came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and then disappeared around the next bend.

“There’s some bad trouble here,” said Tom excitedly.

“What are you doing?” I inquired. “Just standing here, old sport.” Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation.

I must have felt pretty weird by that time, because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his pink suit under the moon.

There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.

He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be.

Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine;

It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes.

and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes...

She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . .

The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves.

Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath.

..even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

He left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind.

He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him.

But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry “Oh, my God!” again...

“Don’t do it to-day,” Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically. “You know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer?”

and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’”

Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool.

From the moment I phoned news of the catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, every practical question, was referred to me.

In fact, there’s a sort of picnic or something. Of course I’ll do my very best to get away.” I ejaculated an unrestrained “Huh!”

...and I should have known better than to call him.

I mentioned Gatsby.

“Oh—h!” She looked at me over again. “Will you just—What was your name?” She vanished.

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested.

Of course we was broke up when he run off from home, but I see now there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of him.

“I come across this book by accident,” said the old man. “It just shows you, don’t it?” “It just shows you.”

So when blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air + wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

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...

I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky.

Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels.

“You threw me over on the phone. I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, & I felt a little dizzy for a while.”

She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties...

—look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting on the sideboard, I sat down & cried like a baby.

Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.

As I sat 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.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.

It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow 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.

THE END