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and fresh (“seen for the first time”), exciting (“first wild promise”), and extrava‑ gant (“all the mystery and the beauty in the world”). We see the same kind of vague longing in the novel’s numerous images of people looking through windows. For example, on Nick’s frequent evening walks along Fifth Avenue he gazes in the windows of throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theatre district. . . . Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. (62; ch. 3)
Of course, Nick longs to be a part of what he sees, to belong, to share in the excitement visible through the cab windows. But he experiences the same kind of longing when he is one of the people inside the window, looking out. As he looks from the window of Tom and Myrtle’s apartment during their party, he muses, high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. (40; ch. 2)
I’m not suggesting that the gathering at Tom and Myrtle’s apartment should satisfy Nick or make him feel less lonely. As this passage indicates, it makes him feel, yet again, that he is on the outside looking in. My point is simply that, in his thirty years of life, Nick has yet to meet people for whom he can sustain the desire to belong. His longing is a form of loneliness, but he doesn’t quite know what it is he’s lonely for. He knows only that he is like the young clerks in one of the novel’s most touching images of vague, unfulfilled longing: “poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life” (62; ch. 3). Furthermore, the image of Nick looking out of Tom and Myrtle’s apartment window, imagining that he is “the casual watcher in the darkening streets . . . looking up” at its yellow light, universal‑ izes the image. Nick is not merely describing his own vague, unfulfilled longing, but the vague, unfulfilled longing of an “Everyman” figure, as well—the “casual watcher”—thus evoking the vague, unfulfilled longing experienced by us all. It is interesting to note that the image of outstretched arms, which, as we have seen, embodies the longing for both past and future, occurs a third time as an image of nonspecific longing at the end of the novel. 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—
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