The Great Gatsby

series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now
I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become
again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.”
This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at
from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of
the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender
riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where
there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of
land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in
contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most
domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great
wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the
egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact
end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual
wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more
interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular
except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though