Phát triển các trung tâm logistics nhằm thúc đẩy tăng trưởng kinh tế ở Việt Nam

Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintles

the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bri

sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garag

PHÁT TRIỂN CÁC TRUNG TÂM LOGISTICS
NHẰM THÚC ĐẨY TĂNG TRƯỞNG KINH TẾ
Ở VIỆT NAM

in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny It

along the rail- road track. ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to

from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed. ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. ‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately. ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon tha

great flock of white sheep turn the corner. ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of r

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.

Đặng Đình Đào
Viện Thương mại và Kinh tế Quốc tế, Trường Đại học Kinh tế Quốc dân
Email:
Tạ Văn Lợi
Viện Thương mại và Kinh tế Quốc tế, Trường Đại học Kinh tế Quốc dân
Email:
Mã bài báo: JED - 207
Ngày nhận: 6/6/2021
Ngày nhận bản sửa: 29/7/2021

Ngày duyệt đăng: 26/8/2021

Tóm tắt:
Tại Việt Nam, dịch vụ logistics lần đầu tiên được đề cập đến trong Luật Thương mại 2005. Đến
năm 2015, Quy hoạch về phát triển hệ thống trung tâm logistics đến năm 2020, và định hướng
đến năm 2030 mới được phê duyệt theo Quyết định số 1012/QĐ-TTg. Tuy nhiên, tới nay, mạng
lưới trung tâm logistics và các khu cơng nghiệp logistics vẫn chưa được hình thành. Đây là một
trong những nguyên nhân đang cản trở sự phát triển của thị trường bất động sản logistics, hạn
chế khả năng thu hút các nguồn lực đầu tư vào logistics, giảm nguồn thu của ngân sách nhà
nước, và kìm hãm sự tăng trưởng kinh tế bền vững. Bài viết này đề cập một số vấn đề về phát
triển trung tâm logistics, một mơ hình quan trọng góp phần thúc đẩy kinh doanh, thực hiện hiệu
quả liên kết kinh tế, và tạo đà cho tăng trưởng kinh tế bền vững tại Việt Nam.
Từ khóa: Mơ hình kinh doanh, logistics, trung tâm logistics, cơ sở hạ tầng logistics, thị trường
bất động sản logistics.
Mã JEL: O18, O21, O40.
Developing logistics centers for promoting Vietnam economic growth
Abstract
In Vietnam, logistics services were first stated in the Commercial Law issued in 2005. However,
until 2015, the planning on the development of the logistics center to 2020 and the orientation to
2030 was still approved under Decision No. 1012/QD-TTg. Up to now, the network of logistics
centers and logistics industrial areas have not been formed. This is one of the reasons that
hinders the development of the logistics real estate market, limits the ability to attract resources
investing in logistics, reduces the revenue of the state budget, and stifles sustainable economic
growth. This study indicates some issues about logistics center development, an important model
that contributes to business promotion, effectively implements economic links, and creates
momentum for sustainable economic growth in Vietnam.
Keywords: Business model, logistics, logistics center, logistics infrastructure, logistics real
estate market.
JEL codes: O18, O21, O40.
1. Đặt vấn đề

Sứ mệnh của logistics là cung ứng hàng hóa dịch vụ đến tay người tiêu dùng với chi phí thấp nhất. Để
thực hiện sứ mạng này giải pháp quan trọng là phải phát triển đồng bộ hệ thống logistics quốc gia. Với
việc mở cửa thị trường dịch vụ logistics từ năm 2013, ngành logistics đã đạt được những kết quả bước đầu
quan trọng, đóng góp tích cực vào sự phát triển kinh tế xã hội của đất nước. Tuy vậy cho đến nay, hệ thống

Số 292(2) tháng 10/2021

20


Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintles

the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bri

sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garag

logistics ở nước ta, nhất là cơ sở hạ tầng logistics còn nhiều hạn chế, làm giảm sức cạnh tranh của hàng hóa
dịch vụ trên cả thị trường trong nước và thị trường quốc tế. Trung tâm logistics được coi là yếu tố quan trọng
trong hệ thống cơ sở hạ tầng logistics nhưng thực sự chưa được quan tâm đầu tư phát triển ở Việt Nam.
Trong khi chúng ta đều thừa nhận rằng “Quá trình sản xuất chỉ kết thúc khi sản phẩm làm ra được đưa tới
tận tay người tiêu dùng”. Tuy nhiên, cả nước có tới 370 khu cơng nghiệp với gần 100 nghìn ha, nhưng Việt
Nam vẫn chưa có một khu công nghiệp logistics nào tại 63 tỉnh, thành phố. Và cịn nhiều rào cản cho q
trình tiếp tục sản xuất (lưu thơng hàng hóa) như các trạm thu phí (BOT) lại mọc lên dày đặc, khoảng cách
không tới 50km, thiếu hệ thống kho tàng, hạ tầng kết nối để giảm chi phí logistics thơng qua phát triển mạng
lưới các trung tâm logistics, chưa hình thành thị trường bất động sản logistics để thu hút đầu tư logistics…
Điều này là có mâu thuẫn với mở cửa và hội nhập logistics của Việt Nam trong thực hiện các FTA thế hệ
mới, nguy cơ dẫn đến nhiều hậu quả cho nền kinh tế - xã hội như làm cho chi phí logistics tăng cao hơn
nhiều so với các nước, ùn tắc, tai nạn giao thông và ô nhiễm môi trường… làm giảm sức cạnh tranh của sản
phẩm và doanh nghiệp trên thị trường, đặc biệt là đối với hàng xuất khẩu. Vì vậy, nghiên cứu này nhằm mục
tiêu luận giải bước đầu cơ sở của các giải pháp phát triển các trung tâm logistics để thu hút đầu tư logistics,

tập trung và quản lý nguồn thu logistics trên địa bàn, gia tăng nguồn thu cho ngân sách nhà nước, hiện thực
hóa liên kết kinh tế giữa các ngành, địa phương và doanh nghiệp trong nền kinh tế quốc dân, phát triển thị
trường bất động sản logistics ở Việt Nam, đồng thời góp phần thúc đẩy tăng trưởng kinh tế nhanh và bền
vững trong bối cảnh mới. Trong các cơng trình nghiên cứu về thương mại và logistics của các giáo viên Viện
Thương mại và Kinh tế Quốc tế trường Đại học Kinh tế Quốc dân cũng đã đề cập đến nhiều vấn đề logistics
nói chung và cơ sở hạ tầng logistics nói riêng. Nhiều vấn đề đã được nghiên cứu như chức năng logistics, hệ
thống logistics, các yêu tố của môi trường logistics, đặc biệt là vai trò và sứ mệnh của các trung tâm logistics
trong hệ thống logistics... và những vấn đề này tiếp tục được nghiên cứu trong bối cảnh mới của nền kinh
tế với nhiều biến động khôn lường do biến đổi khí hậu và thiên tai dịch bệnh như đại dịch Covid 19... Điển
hình là trong các ấn phẩm của Đặng Đình Đào (2015, 2020), Trần Văn Bão & Đặng Thị Thúy Hồng (2018)
hay Đặng Đình Đào & Tạ Văn Lợi (2019)…
Mặc dù, đóng vai trị hết sức quan trọng trong đổi mới mơ hình tăng trưởng và cơ cấu lại nền kinh tế, bởi
chính logistics là quá trình tổ chức và quản lý khoa học các khâu của quá trình tái sản xuất xã hội, là quá
trình tối ưu hóa các dịng vận động hàng hóa, tiền tệ, thông tin trong nền kinh tế quốc dân nhằm giảm tối đa
các chi phí và nâng cao hiệu quả các hoạt động kinh tế, nhưng nhận thức lĩnh vực này cịn hạn chế (Đặng Đình
Đào & Trương Tấn Qn, 2016). Sự ra đời và phát triển các trung tâm logistics gắn liền với quá trình phát
triển ngành logistics trên thế giới. Ở nước ta, ngành logistics và trung tâm logistics đang còn là vấn đề mới mẻ,
ngay cả trong các chính sách, chiến lược và kế hoạch phát triển kinh tế - xã hội giai đoạn 2016-2020, các vấn
đề về hệ thống logistics, trong đó có các trung tâm logistics cũng chưa được đề cập. Điều đó cho thấy q trình
chuyển đổi mơ hình tăng trưởng kinh tế, chuyển từ phát triển theo chiều rộng, dựa vào lao động giá rẻ và tài
nguyên sang phát triển theo chiều sâu dựa vào khoa học công nghệ, năng suất và hiệu quả cịn nhiều khó khăn.
Nghiên cứu này của chúng tơi bắt đầu bằng khn khổ đánh giá tình hình phát triển các trung tâm
logistics, thực thi chính sách phát triển logistics hiện nay ở nước ta và những tác động trong bối cảnh mới.
Từ đó, đưa ra một số khuyến nghị nhằm phát triển trung tâm logistics và thị trường bất động sản logistics
trong giai đoạn trước mắt và sự phát triển bền vững trong dài hạn.
2. Thực trạng và giải pháp phát triển các trung tâm logistics
Kiến tạo môi trường logistics quốc gia, trong đó quy hoạch và việc thực hiện xây dựng các trung tâm
logistics, phát triển thị trường bất động sản logistics chính là hành động để hiện thực hóa q trình chuyển
đổi mơ hình tăng trưởng kinh tế, thực hiện hiệu quả liên kết kinh tế trong các ngành và vùng lãnh thổ.
Cũng giống như logistics, khái niệm trung tâm logistics (Logistics centres, Freight villages, Logistics

park, Logistics zones) đang có nhiều định nghĩa khác nhau tùy theo từng góc độ nghiên cứu. Theo Hiệp hội
trung tâm logistics Châu Âu Europlatforms (European associantion of freight villagers), trung tâm logistics
là một khu vực nơi thực hiện các hoạt động liên quan đến vận tải, logistics và phân phối hàng hóa nội địa
cũng như quốc tế, được thực hiện bởi nhiều chủ thể khác nhau. Các chủ thể này có thể là người chủ sở hữu
hoặc là người thuê sử dụng các cơ sở vật chất và trang thiết bị của trung tâm logistics như kho bãi, văn
phòng, khu vực xếp dỡ hàng… Trung tâm logistics cần phải có và được trang bị các thiết bị phục vụ các
hoạt động và dịch vụ của trung tâm. Trung tâm logistics được kết nối với các hạ tầng vận tải khác nhau như

in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny It

along the rail- road track. ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to

from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed. ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. ‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately. ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon tha

great flock of white sheep turn the corner. ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of r

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.

Số 292(2) tháng 10/2021

21


Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintles

the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bri

sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garag

đường ô tô, đường sắt, đường biển, đường sông, đường hàng không.
Như vậy, một trung tâm logistics cơ bản phải đảm bảo 5 yếu tố: Khu vực - nơi thực hiện các hoạt động vận
tải, logistics, thương mại trong nước và quốc tế (là khu vực có hàng rào riêng); các hoạt động tại trung tâm
được thực hiện bởi nhiều chủ thể khác nhau; các chủ thể có thể là chủ sở hữu hoặc là người thuê sử dụng cơ
sở vật chất của trung tâm; trung tâm logistics được đầu tư xây dựng và trang thiết bị phục vụ cho các hoạt
động dịch vụ của trung tâm; trung tâm logistics phải được kết nối với nhiều hạ tầng vận tải như đường ô tô,
đường sắt, đường biển, đường sông, đường hàng không… Trung tâm logistics được xây dựng nhằm thực
hiện các chức năng cơ bản: Lưu kho bãi (Storage); xếp dỡ hàng (Materials handling) (Оcиoвa, 1997); gom
hàng (Consolidation); chia nhỏ hàng (break bulk); phối hợp phân chia hàng (Cross-docking) (Rushton &
cộng sự, 2006); lưu giữ hàng tối ưu (Postponement); tạo ra giá trị gia tăng (Value added logistics - VAL);
chuyển tải (Transshipment) và logistics ngược, xúc tiến thương mại, thúc đẩy tiêu thụ sản phẩm và mơ hình
kinh doanh, thực hiện liên kết kinh tế của các doanh nghiệp hay chủ đầu tư logistics. Với các chức năng cơ
bản trên, trung tâm logistics có vai trị rất quan trọng trong việc tối ưu hóa các dịng vận động hàng hóa, tiền
tệ, thơng tin; thúc đẩy lưu thơng hàng hóa, xuất nhập khẩu, giảm chi phí logistics, nâng cao hiệu quả và khả
năng cạnh tranh cho các doanh nghiệp và hàng hóa trên các thị trường trong điều kiện hội nhập sâu rộng vào
nền kinh tế khu vực và thế giới. Đặc biệt, các trung tâm logistics được coi là mơ hình kinh doanh mới, mơ
hình thực hiện hiệu quả liên kết kinh tế của các ngành, các địa phương và vùng lãnh thổ… Sự kết nối các
trung tâm logistics trong vùng hình thành nên cụm logistics (logistics clusters).
Hoạt động logistics đã diễn ra từ lâu tại Việt Nam và luôn gắn liền với lịch sử phát triển của đất nước,
nhưng phải đến năm 2005, Việt Nam mới có văn bản pháp luật đầu tiên định nghĩa về hoạt động này tại Luật
Thương mại. Logistics ở Việt Nam mặc dù đang trong giai đoạn đầu của sự phát triển nhưng đã có những
đóng góp nhất định trong phát triển kinh tế - xã hội. Thực tế ở Việt Nam, Logistics có sự phát triển nhanh
chóng và trở thành ngành kinh tế đóng góp ngày càng quan trọng đối với sự phát triển kinh tế đất nước. Cùng
với sự phát triển của ngành logistics, cơ sở hạ tầng logistics, trong đó có các trung tâm logistics từng bước
được đầu tư xây dựng ở Việt Nam. Ở giai đoạn đầu, nhằm đáp ứng nhu cầu phân phối, lưu thơng hàng hóa
và vận tải hàng hóa tăng nhanh, đặc biệt là hàng container đã hình thành nhiều trung tâm phân phối, nhiều
cảng nội địa tại các vùng trên cả nước (đây là hệ thống hạ tầng kho hàng, bến bãi phục vụ cho các hoạt động
logistics). Khu vực phía Bắc có các cảng ICD như Gia Lâm, Mỹ Đình (Hà Nội), Thụy Vân (Phú Thọ), Hải
Dương (Hải Dương), Ninh Phúc (Ninh Bình), Hịa Xá (Nam Định), Tiên Sơn (Bắc Ninh), Lào Cai (Lào Cai).

Khu vực phía Nam, lượng hàng hóa lưu thơng lớn, khối lượng hàng container thông qua các cảng biển
chiếm trên 70% cả nước. Đây là một trong những yếu tố quan trọng thúc đẩy sự hình thành và phát triển các
cảng nội địa ICD và các điểm làm thủ tục hải quan ngoài cửa khẩu và hệ thống kho bãi chứa hàng. Khu vực
phía Nam hiện có các ICD đang hoạt động như Phước Long Transimex, Biên Hịa, Bến Nghé (Trường Thọ),
Sóng Thần (trong khu cơng nghiệp Sóng Thần), Tanamexco, Phúc Long, Sotrans, Tân cảng - Long Bình.
Ngồi ra, trong một số khu cơng nghiệp hình thành các điểm làm thủ tục hải quan, điểm kiểm tra hàng hóa
ngồi cửa khẩu.
Với tiềm năng phát triển thị trường logistics Việt Nam, nhiều doanh nghiệp trong nước và quốc tế đã và
đang đầu tư mạnh vào lĩnh vực logistics, công ty liên doanh Indo - Trans Keppel logistics Việt Nam (ITL
Keppel), công ty Keppel logistics thuộc Tập đồn Viễn thơng và Vận tải Keppel, cơng ty sản xuất, nhập
khẩu Bình Dương (Protrade), Tập đồn YCH của Singapore, Cơng ty DD Schenker Việt Nam thuộc Tập
đồn Logistics Schenker đưa vào khai thác trung tâm logistics SCL tại khu cơng nghiệp Sóng Thần I (Bình
Dương). Cơng ty cổ phần đầu tư Bắc Kỳ xây dựng trung tâm logistics Tiên Sơn (Bắc Ninh) với diện tích 10
ha. Transimex - Sài Gòn, năm 2015 thực hiện dự án “Kho ngoại quan và Trung tâm logistics khu công nghệ
cao thành phố Hồ Chí Minh… với diện tích 10 ha gồm hệ thống kho ngoại quan, kho bảo thuế, kho CFS,
kho thường, kho lạnh và bãi chứa container…
Những năm gần đây nhiều tỉnh, thành phố đã và đang quan tâm đầu tư nhiều dự án lớn về trung tâm
logistics, như tỉnh Quảng Ninh đề xuất xây dựng khu hậu cần sau cảng và logistics tại khu vực Quảng Yên
với quy mô 3.000 – 5000 ha (ngày 23 tháng 4 năm 2019). Tại Vĩnh Phúc, tháng 12 năm 2020 Liên danh Tập
đoàn T&T Group của Việt Nam và Tập đoàn YCH của Singapore triển khai trên địa bàn thị trấn Hương Canh
và xã Sơn Lơi, huyện Bình Xun, tỉnh Vĩnh Phúc. Dự án Trung tâm Logistics ICD Vĩnh Phúc nằm trên diện
tích rộng hơn 83 hecta, dự án có trung tâm điều hành thơng minh cảng cạn Super Port, sẽ giúp nhanh chóng

in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny It

along the rail- road track. ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to

from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed. ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. ‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately. ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon tha

great flock of white sheep turn the corner. ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of r

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.

Số 292(2) tháng 10/2021

22


Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintles

the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bri

sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garag

và dễ dàng vận chuyển hàng hóa bằng đường bộ, đường sắt, cũng như chuyển hàng tới các cảng biển và sân
bay trong khoảng thời gian tối thiểu… Tại Hải Phòng, đến năm 2020, có 4 trung tâm logistics trong đó có
01 trung tâm logistics Nam Đình Vũ và 03 trung tâm logistics cấp tỉnh tại Lạch Huyện, huyện Cát Hải, VSIP
tại khu công nghiệp VSIP Thủy Nguyên và Tràng Duệ tại khu công nghiệp Tràng Duệ huyện An Dương.
Bà Rịa - Vũng Tàu đang triển khai dự án trung tâm logistics Cái Mép Hạ hạng I thuộc vùng Đông Nam Bộ
(ngày 20 tháng 3 năm 2021)… Theo Bộ Công thương (2020), đến cuối năm 2019, cả nước có 69 trung tâm
logistics tại 10 tỉnh, thành phố, phân bổ tập trung ở một số khu cơng nghiệp phía Nam… Cùng với q trình
hội nhập ngày càng sâu rộng vào nền kinh tế khu vực và thế giới, hệ thống các trung tâm logistics Việt Nam
được hình thành và ngày càng đóng vai trị quan trọng trong hệ thống logistics quốc gia, góp phần thúc đẩy
thương mại trong nước và xuất nhập khẩu hàng hóa…

in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny It

along the rail- road track. ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to

from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed. ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. ‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately. ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon tha

great flock of white sheep turn the corner. ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of r

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.

Tuy nhiên, sự phát triển trung tâm logistics ở nước ta còn tồn tại nhiều bất cập và hạn chế. Trước hết, sự
quan tâm, quy hoạch đầu tư xây dựng các trung tâm logistics vẫn cịn hạn chế. Tầm nhìn ngắn hạn, hệ thống
kết cấu hạ tầng giao thông tuy được đầu tư xây dựng khang trang nhưng thường mang tính đơn lẻ theo từng
phương tiện, thiếu kết nối liên hoàn, thiếu các trung tâm logistics hậu cần cho vận hành khai thác hiệu quả và
văn minh giao thông. Quy mô các trung tâm logistics được xây dựng tự phát có quy mơ nhỏ, thường ở mức
dưới 10 ha, thậm chí từ 1 ha đến 2 ha, trong khi ở các nước, quy mô của trung tâm logistics bằng cả quy mô
khu công nghiệp (khu công nghiệp logistics) lên đến cả 1500 ha. Trung tâm logistics ở nước ta chủ yếu
thuộc sở hữu của một doanh nghiệp và cung ứng dịch vụ cho khách hàng, chưa phát triển đến quy mô
hội đủ các yếu tố của một trung tâm logistics như các nước. Việt Nam chưa có một trung tâm logistics
nào đáp ứng cả 5 yếu tố mà chỉ là ICD mở rộng thêm một số chức năng; chưa hình thành các cụm
logistics, các trung tâm logistics chưa thực hiện được chức năng kết nối liên hoàn các phương tiện
vận tải của các địa phương và vùng lãnh thổ vì các trung tâm logistics hiện nay được xây dựng riêng
lẻ trong các khu công nghiệp chỉ để phục vụ mục đích của doanh nghiệp đầu tư kinh doanh. Như đánh
giá của Bộ Công Thương (2020), “Quy mơ của các trung tâm logistics nhìn chung cịn nhỏ (dưới 10
ha), chủ yếu phục vụ một số doanh nghiệp trong khu vực khu công nghiệp hoặc một tỉnh thành,chưa
phát triển đến quy mô phục vụ ngành hoặc một vùng kinh tế”. Quyết định 1012/QĐ-TTg về quy hoạch
phát triển hệ thống trung tâm logistics quy mô loại 1 mới chỉ có 20-30 ha, loại 2 là 10-12 ha; trung tâm
logistics chun dùng chỉ có 3-4 ha, bằng quy mơ của các cảng cạn ICD, kho bãi trong phân phối, lưu
thơng (Thủ tướng Chính phủ, 2015). Việt Nam cho đến nay chưa có khu cơng nghiệp logistics nào,
cịn tại các khu công nghiệp của các địa phương, thành phố, các doanh nghiệp đầu tư xây dựng trung
tâm phân phối (logistics) của mình để phục vụ cho sản xuất kinh doanh và làm kinh doanh dịch vụ cho

thuê; đang có sự bất cập trong quy hoạch các khu công nghiệp và các trung tâm logistics (khu công
nghiệp logisics). Chúng ta dường như mới chỉ chú ý đến quy hoạch phát triển các khu công nghiệp
sản xuất, gia công, lắp ráp mà khơng tính đến các khu cơng nghiệp hậu cần (logistics)…
Hệ lụy là làm cho chi phí logistics tăng cao so với các nước, gây ắch tắc trong lưu thông hàng hóa giữa
các vùng miền; làm giảm giá trị, chất lượng hàng hóa và khả năng cạnh tranh trên các thị trường; đi xa hơn
là làm trầm trọng thêm ùn tắc giao thông, sử dụng hiệu quả thấp các phương thức vận tải vốn Việt Nam có
nhiều lợi thế như đường biển, đường sông, đường sắt, trong khi đường bộ lại quá tải… Những bất cập, tồn
tại trên là do nhiều nguyên nhân chủ quan và khách quan như nhận thức về vai trị và vị trí của cơ sở hạ tầng
logistics nói chung và các trung tâm logistics nói riêng trong nền kinh tế chưa đầy đủ. Cơ chế, chính sách
phát triển cơ sở hạ tầng logistics, bao gồm các trung tâm logistics còn rất hạn chế, nhất là quỹ đất cho phát
triển bất động sản logistics; các ngành và các địa phương chưa quan tâm, ủng hộ đúng mức đối với logistics
và phát triển các trung tâm logistics, vì mơ hình tăng trưởng kinh tế vẫn chủ yếu theo chiều rộng, năng suất,
chất lượng cịn thấp.
Hậu cần (logistics) ln đặt ra cho mọi nền sản xuất xã hội vì nó là một tất yếu đảm bảo cho mọi nền kinh
tế luôn được phát triển nhịp nhàng, bền vững và hiệu quả cao. Vì vậy, để biến tiềm năng thành lợi thế phát
triển, góp phần thực hiện thắng lợi các mục tiêu phát triển kinh tế - xã hội theo Nghị quyết Đại hội Đảng toàn
quốc lần thứ XIII, thúc đẩy tăng trưởng kinh tế nhanh và bền vững, chúng tơi cho rằng cần phải có nhiều
giải pháp đồng bộ thực hiện cả trước mắt và lâu dài, đặc biệt là cần khắc phục những “mất cân bằng” trong
tư duy, trong các chính sách đầu tư phát triển sản xuất, phân phối và lưu thông. Ở đây, chúng tôi chỉ xin trao
đổi một số khía cạnh về xây dựng mạng lưới các trung tâm logistics - mơ hình kinh doanh mới, thực hiện

Số 292(2) tháng 10/2021

23


Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintles

the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bri

sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garag

hiệu quả liên kết kinh tế giữa các địa phương:
Thứ nhất, cần nâng cao nhận thức về vai trò quan trọng của cơ sở hạ tầng logistics và trung tâm logistics,
đặc biệt là thị trường bất động sản logistics trong thu hút đầu tư logistics, thúc đẩy tiêu thụ sản phẩm và xuất
nhập khẩu. Các trung tâm logistics hoạt động như một mô hình kinh doanh, thực hiện hiệu quả các hình thức
liên kết kinh tế sẽ tạo nguồn thu, đóng góp lớn cho ngân sách nhà nước nhưng đang bị phân tán, thiếu quản
lý và thậm chí đang cịn chảy vào tay của các doanh nghiệp ngoại. Do vậy, phải nâng cao hơn nữa mức ủng
hộ đối với quy hoạch, triển khai và xây dựng hệ thống các trung tâm logistics, khu cơng nghiệp logistics,
cụm logistics - hình thành thị trường bất động sản logistics Việt Nam.
Thứ hai, Việt Nam cần sớm xây dựng một khung pháp lý đồng bộ cho hoạt động logistics, trước mắt cần
nghiên cứu bổ sung và sửa đổi Luật Thương mại về các nội dung liên quan dịch vụ logistics, quản lý nhà
nước về logistics, hệ thống logistics, hoạt động kinh tế logistics, hệ thống chỉ tiêu kinh tế - kỹ thuật trong
logistics... Từ đó sớm có được các văn bản hướng dẫn phù hợp với thực tiễn hoạt động logistics hiện nay.
Một hành lang pháp lý bao gồm các quy định pháp luật cụ thể, rõ ràng, minh bạch, có hiệu lực trong thực tiễn
với sự quan tâm của Nhà nước và chính quyền các địa phương trong đầu tư cơ sở hạ tầng logistics, phát triển
doanh nhiệp… là những tiền đề quan trọng để thúc đẩy ngành logistics Việt Nam phát triển, đóng góp lớn
hơn nữa cho ngân sách nhà nước. Vì vậy, với một lĩnh quan trọng trong nền kinh tế quốc dân như logistics
thì cùng với việc hồn thiện, bổ sung 8 Điều trong Luật Thương mại 2005, chúng ta phải tính xây dựng Luật
logistics Việt Nam trong tương lai gần là cần thiết.
Thứ ba, cần sớm xây dựng Chiến lược phát triển logistics Việt Nam đến năm 2030, tầm nhìn đến năm
2045. Với vị trí “Nhạc trưởng” - “Tổng tư lệnh”, logistics là ngành dịch vụ cơ sở hạ tầng quan trọng, mang
tính liên ngành, hiệu lực, hiệu quả quản lý logistics là kết quả tích hợp khoa học, liên ngành giao thông vận
tải, kế hoạch và đầu tư, thương mại, tài chính, hải quan, cơng nghệ thơng tin... Do đó, để quản lý nhà nước
thống nhất trên quan điểm hiệu quả, lợi ích tồn cục và tối ưu hóa các dịng vận động hàng hóa dịch vụ, tiền
tệ, nhân lực và thông tin giữa các ngành, các địa phương - Nền tảng cho sự tham gia hiệu quả các chuỗi cung
ứng tồn cầu, cần phải có một Ủy ban Quốc gia về logistics làm chức năng quản lý nhà nước logistics, giải
bài tốn tối ưu cho từng chương trình, dự án trên phạm vi nền kinh tế quốc dân và từng khu vực (Đặng Đình
Đào, 2019, 2020).
Thứ tư, cần rà sốt để sửa đổi và tích hợp kịp thời để tránh trùng lặp, chồng chéo, thậm chí mâu thuẫn

nhau trong các chính sách phát triển của các ngành dịch vụ cơ sở hạ tầng như giao thông, thương mại, công
nghệ thông tin, tài chính,… để Việt Nam có được một cơ sở khoa học quản lý vững chắc, nguồn số liệu
thống kê logistics thống nhất về các chỉ tiêu kinh tế - tài chính từ các hoạt động logistics được tính tốn có
cơ sở, tránh trùng lặp thay vì chỉ dựa vào nguồn số liệu của các công ty tư vấn, theo kiểu “bốc thuốc” cho
một lĩnh vực rất quan trọng của nền kinh tế quốc dân… Vì cho đến nay, có thể nói chúng ta vẫn chưa xác
định rõ ràng hoạt động kinh tế thuộc lĩnh vực logistics bao gồm những hoạt động nào? (hay là chỉ “hoạt
động kinh tế” nằm trong mã ngành 5229 - “Hoạt động lập kế hoạch, tổ chức và hỗ trợ vận tải, kho bãi và
phân phối hàng hóa”) theo như Quyết định số 27/QĐ-TTg ngày 6 tháng 7 năm 2018 về Ban hành hệ thống
ngành kinh tế Việt Nam ? Vì vậy, tại Chỉ thị số 21/CT/2018/TTg ngày 18 tháng 7 năm 2018 về “đẩy mạnh
triển khai các các giải pháp nhằm giảm chi phí logistics, kết nối hiệu quả hệ thống hạ tầng giao thơng”, Thủ
tướng Chính phủ giao cho Bộ Khoa học và Đào tạo “Xây dựng hệ thống chỉ tiêu thống kê và thu thập dữ liệu
thống kê về logistics” cần sớm nghiên cứu ban hành để làm cơ sở cho việc đánh giá và quản lý thông nhất
ngành logistics hiện nay?
Thứ năm, xây dựng đồng bộ các trung tâm logistics (khu công nghiệp logistics, cụm logistics…) nhằm
thúc đẩy phát triển bền vững kinh tế theo mơ hình Logistics Xanh (Cảng biển → Đường sắt → Các trung
tâm Logistics → Đường ô tô → Khách hàng), phát triển Logistics thành phố. Phải đặc biệt quan tâm đầu tư
xây dựng hạ tầng kết nối để phát triển vận tải đa phương thức nhằm giảm chi phí logistics, coi các trung tâm
logistics như là mơ hình kinh doanh mới, mơ hình thực hiện liên kết hiệu quả giữa các ngành, các địa phương
và vùng lãnh thổ và là giải pháp quan trọng trong thu hút đầu tư logistics, tập trung và quản lý nguồn thu
từ các hoạt động logistics nhằm tăng nguồn thu cho ngân sách nhà nước, hạn chế tình trạng chuyển giá…,
là giải pháp để xây dựng hệ thống giao thông, thương mại thơng minh… (Đặng Đình Đào & Tạ Văn Lợi,
2019).
Cần đầu tư xây dựng các trung tâm logistics để kết nối vùng kinh tế, khai thác các tuyến hành lang kinh

in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny It

along the rail- road track. ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to

from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed. ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. ‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately. ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon tha

great flock of white sheep turn the corner. ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of r

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.

Số 292(2) tháng 10/2021

24


Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintles

the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bri

sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garag

tế, để thúc đẩy lưu thơng hàng hóa, xuất nhập khẩu và tiêu thụ sản phẩm cho các ngành và địa phương. Các
trung tâm logistics cần được xây dựng tại các điểm kết nối các loại phương tiện vận tải mà địa phương, vùng
lãnh thổ đang có lợi thế như đường bộ, đường sắt, đường thủy… Đừng để tình trạng như nhiều địa phương
hiện nay xây dựng các trung trung logistics trong các khu cơng nghiệp rồi mới tính làm dự án xây đường kết
nối vào trung tâm. Các trung tâm phải được quy hoạch, xây dựng có quy mơ tương đương với các khu công
nghiệp hiện nay ở nước ta để thu hút các tập đoàn logistics của khu vực, thế giới, các doanh nghiệp logistics
trong nước vào đầu tư, kinh doanh. Cần sớm quy hoạch, xây dựng các khu công nghiệp logistics làm hậu cần
cho các khu công nghiệp sản xuất tại các vùng kinh tế và các địa phương, chứ không nên quá tập trung xây dựng
các trung tâm logistics quy mô nhỏ 2-3 ha trong các khu công nghiệp như hiện nay.
Thứ sáu, cần có chính sách đặc thù về đất đai cho xây dựng các trung tâm logistics tại các địa phương
nhằm thực hiện liên kết kinh tế hiệu quả giữa các ngành, địa phương và vùng lãnh thổ, thơng quan đó thúc
đẩy lưu thơng và xuất nhập khẩu hàng hóa, khai thác hiệu quả dư địa cịn rất lớn từ dịch vụ logistics để tăng
nguồn thu cho ngân sách nhà nước. Cơ sở hạ tầng logsitics phát triển chính là hệ thống cơ sở hạ tầng được

kết nối liên hoàn của các cơ sở hạ tầng giao thông, thương mại, công nghệ thông tin và các lĩnh vực dịch vụ
khác có liên quan theo hướng đảm bảo tối ưu hóa dịng vận động hàng hóa, tiền tệ, thơng tin với mục tiêu
giảm chi phí thấp nhất trong phân phối, lưu thông của nền kinh tế quốc dân. Ưu tiên đầu tư phát triển hệ
thống đường gom, đường kết nối ở các địa phương, phát triển các phần mềm chuyên ứng dụng logistics để
giảm chi phí logistics cho các doanh nghiệp.
Thứ bảy, đẩy mạnh đào tạo và phát triển nguồn nhân lực logistics trong nền kinh tế quốc dân. Từ đội
ngũ cán bộ quản lý nhà nước trung ương đến cán bộ quản lý các địa phương rất cần được trang bị kiến thức
logistics, có tư duy logistics để tổ chức và quản lý khoa học các hoạt động của mình với thời gian và chi phí
thấp nhất nhằm có các quyết định và giải quyết các vấn đề của nền kinh tế trên quan điểm lợi ích tồn cục lợi ích quốc gia, tránh tư tưởng lợi ích cục bộ địa phương, lợi ích nhóm và lợi ích dự án.
Thứ tám, tăng cường nghiên cứu và học tập kinh nghiệm của các nước có nền cơng nghiệp logistics phát
triển, đặc biệt là trong xây dựng và vận hành các trung tâm logistics, cụm logistics. Ở các nước, ngành
logistics ln giữ vai trị quan trọng trong nền kinh tế và các hoạt động logistics luôn đem lại hiệu quả kinh
tế cao, nguồn thu lớn cho Ngân sách nhà nước. Trong giai đoạn phát triển hiện nay, việc nghiên cứu, học
tập kinh nghiệm từ các nước có nền cơng nghiệp logistics phát triển là rất cần thiết (Đặng Đình Đào & Tạ
Văn Lợi, 2019).

in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny It

along the rail- road track. ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance to

from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed. ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. ‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately. ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon tha

great flock of white sheep turn the corner. ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of r

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.

Tài liệu tham khảo
Bộ Công Thương (2020), Báo cáo chuyên đề tổng hợp số 35: Đánh giá thực trạng việc thực hiện đột phá chiến lược về

phát triển kết cấu hạ tầng giai đoạn 2011 – 2020 và vấn đề đặt ra trong giai đoạn 2021 – 2030, kế hoạch 5 năm
2021 – 2025, Hà Nội.
Đặng Đình Đào (2015), ‘Phát triển c.ác trung tâm logistics – Mơ hình thực hiện hiệu quả liên kết kinh tế ở nước ta’,
Tạp chí thơng tin và dự báo kinh tế - xã hội, 07.
Đặng Đình Đào (2019), ‘Phát triển bền vững tỉnh Thanh Hóa đến năm 2030, tầm nhìn đến năm 2045’, Kỷ yếu: Hội thảo
Xây dựng và phát triển tỉnh Thanh Hóa đến năm 2030, tầm nhìn đến năm 2045, Ban Chấp hành Trung ương - Ban
Chỉ đạo 218, 230-245.
Đặng Đình Đào (2020), ‘Bài toán quản lý nhà nước về ngành logisitics’, Tạp chí Kinh tế và Dự báo, 04.
Đặng Đình Đào & Tạ Văn Lợi (2019), Dịch vụ logistics ở Việt Nam trong tiến trình hội nhập quốc tế, Nhà xuất bản
Lao động - Xã hội.
Đặng Đình Đào & Trương Tấn Quân (2016), Một số vấn đề thương mại và logistics ở Việt Nam thời kỳ đổi mới 19862016, Nhà xuất bản Lao động - Xã hội.
Оcиoвa, B. (1997), юнити, Оcнoвы Кoммepчecкoй geятeльноcти М. Изgaт.
Rushton, A, Croucher, P. & Baker, P. (2006), Handbook of Logistics and Distribution Management, Kogan Page Limited.
Thủ tướng Chính phủ (2015), Quyết định số 1012/QĐ-TTg về việc phê duyệt quy hoạch phát triển hệ thống trung tâm
logistics trên địa bàn cả nước đến năm 2020, định hướng đến năm 2030, ban hành ngày 03 tháng 07 năm 2015.
Trần Văn Bão & Đặng Thị Thúy Hồng (2018), Quản trị logistics, Nhà xuất bản Lao động -Xã hội.

Số 292(2) tháng 10/2021

25


Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintles

the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bri

sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the gara

in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny I

along the rail- road track. ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance t

from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed. ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. ‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately. ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon th

great flock of white sheep turn the corner. ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of r

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.


Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintles

the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bri

sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the gara

in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny I

along the rail- road track. ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance t

from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed. ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. ‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately. ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon th

great flock of white sheep turn the corner. ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of r

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.

Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintles

the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bri

sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the gara

in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny I

along the rail- road track. ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance t

from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed. ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. ‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately. ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon th

great flock of white sheep turn the corner. ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of r

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.


Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintles

the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bri

sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the gara

in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny I

along the rail- road track. ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance t

from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed. ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. ‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately. ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon th

great flock of white sheep turn the corner. ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of r

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.


Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen- dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintles

the sol- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27 emn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. ‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’ I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un- der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bri

sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night 28 The Great Gatsby restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car vis- ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae- mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. ‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’ ‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘ His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the gara

in a mo- ment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29 but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: ‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’ She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny I

along the rail- road track. ‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’ ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New 30 The Great Gatsby York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth- er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus- lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echo- ing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow- ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. ‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’ We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd re- semblance t

from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde- terminate breed. ‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. ‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’ Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31 The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. ‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’ ‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’ ‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’ The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale con- cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately. ‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon th

great flock of white sheep turn the corner. ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’ 32 The Great Gatsby ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Cathe- rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’ ‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil- son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. ‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’ The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33 in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap- peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wil- son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of r

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.