Sometimes there were kids who were simply born to be thirty, or fifty, or seventy; I could see their unfinished teenaged faces overlaid with the transparencies of their aged selves and had to resist telling them so - that the maturity that wanted was going to happen, that someday they would look as completed as they felt, in their fleeting, truest moments.

Every year, when we finished Gatsby, I read the last page aloud. Also, every year, I wept... I almost looked forward to it. Crying once a year is probably necessary... it was involuntary, almost external, like being rained on, a nourishment, and it made me glad that I could feel that deeply, or had once.