How Science ("the gnostic light") prevailed & railed Against the Day Labor of Workers

[alice wellintown]

In Gatsby we see how the world of tools, of hardware, Nick Caraway's
world of the West, is replaced by the eastern Abstractions of
mathematics, of intangible derivatives, of bonds and wall street
calculations, of spread sheets and train time tables, of schedules and
party guest lists,  and of to-do lists, of Franklin's Poor Richard's
protestant work ethic made American-Capitalism against the sin of idle
hands, against the battered blindman Bartleby, his civil disobediance,
his resistance to a world bereft of Charity.  This book, and other
Fitzgerald books, though not as important to the formative P as Adams,
is quite important to our reading of P's critique of science and
mathematics. I sugest, as I have several times, Tanner's American
Mystery, and more specifically, a brilliant essay, the introduction to
Gatsby in the wordsworth Edition, " 'The Constant Flicker' of  the
American Scene" by Guy Reynolds.