I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Dan Rose of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from a Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Dan Rose that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.
But his heart was in a constant turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon him some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.
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