I want leisure to read — an immense amount. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes

"Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?"
I didn't answer.
Nick?" he asked again.
What?"
Want any?"
No... I just remembered that today's my birthday."
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows- it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven.