Nick komt aan in West Egg

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning a man, even newer than I in those parts, stopped me on the street. 'How do you get to West Egg Village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. And when I walked on, I no longer felt lonely. I was a guide, a pathfinder, a native. He had casually granted me the local citizenship.

It was a matter of chance that I had to rent a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It lay on that slender lush island that extends due east of New York—and where, among all natural peculiarities, two unusual land formations are found. Twenty miles outside the city, a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated merely for form's sake by a bay, protrude into the most domesticated saltwater mass of 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 point—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. For the wingless, it is a more interesting phenomenon that they are so different in every respect except their shape and size.

I lived in West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a very superficial label to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between those two.