iscourse of Christian Platonism, dazzling beams or enargeiai that draw back the contemplative observer into their divine source; or it may be that the raptus draws poets into a pantheistic Romantic world-spirit, into "a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused." However construed, structural to the entire tradition is a shining higher order by which mortals mired in a corrupt, contingent realm become, in Fitzgerald's language, "for a transitory enchanted moment compelled into an aesthetic contemplation" (Gatsby 182), and "gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder" (112). Fitzgerald, then, and his Gatsby experience intimations of what was once conceived as the "beatific." Daisy, as the inexpressible exquisite disclosing the radiant higher kingdom (here, indefeasible wealth), necessarily remains descriptively discarnate, in contrast to the sexually profiled Jordan and Myrtle (11, 25). Daisy "gleams like silver," like "the silver pepper of the stars," exists as a voice, "a singing compulsion," "an incarnation," educing the marriage of "unutterable visions to her perishable breath" (150, 21, 9, 112). But Daisy is, precisely, perishable: tragically inadequate to the inspiration she kindles. For Fitzgerald, the terms the world affords for the instantiation of ideality are inadequate; yet the ideal remains indefinable in terms of any other order, any specifiable transcendent origin. Fitzgerald thus diverges from the classic Western dualism that offers a transcendent situating of inspiration: for him, it has neither "ground" nor viable instantiation. Displaced and demystified by contemporary secular cynicism, Fitzgerald's relation to the ideal is precisely Nick's: Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something — an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a d...
