CHAPTER 2

"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on, I was no longer lonely. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually granted me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so, with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was starting anew with the summer.

There was so much to read, and so much fine health to be pulled from the young, invigorating air.

 I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint,

promising to reveal the shining secrets that only Midas, Morgan, and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books as well.

I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale

News'—and now I was going to reintroduce 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 observed from a single window, after all.

It was by chance that I ended up renting a house in one of the most peculiar communities in North America. It was on that slender, riotous island extending due east

of New York, which has, among other natural curiosities, two unusual land formations. Twenty miles from the city, a pair of enormous eggs, identical in shape and separated

only by a courtesy bay, jut into the most domesticated body of saltwater 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 flattened at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead.

To the wingless, a more striking phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every aspect except shape and size.