"Only Maury Noble remained awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house. He was sorry for no one now — on Monday morning there would be his business, and later there would be a girl of another class whose whole life he was; these were the things nearest his heart. In the strangeness of the brightening day it seemed presumptuous that with this feeble, broken instrument of his mind he had ever tried to think.
There was the sun, letting down great glowing masses of heat; there was life, active and snarling, moving about them like a fly swarm — the dark pants of smoke from the engine, a crisp "all aboard!" and a bell ringing."
— The Beautiful and the Damned, page 259-260
With this passage I felt a part of Maury Noble's transition of thought — this mental flow of any man or woman who has felt time and space eating away at existence, at his or her potential to be great. I loved the choice of word's — "radiance of existence", "broken instrument of his mind." Fitzgerald has the ability to perfectly paint the unknowns of our minds. He has the ability to describe these shadows of uncertainty and purpose that creep and pull at human existence.
