From Book 2, Chapter 10. Tender Is The Night was the author’s fourth and final finished novel, published 12 April 1934 by Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York, NY)
The brothers’ related banter…
J: …I’m also doing terribly because I just have gotten out of the dentist’s office. Like, I have just risen from the dentist’s chair as I am recording this, and I am in terrible, terrible pain in my lower jaw.
H: Do they let you cast? Do they let you do the pod from the dentist’s office? That’s nice of them.
J: No, I mean, I then drove to work, and you know, now I’m here. But yeah, I cannot recommend– this all started, as you know Hank, many many years ago, like 18 years ago, when I was hit by a bike messenger on the streets of Chicago. His shoulder into my jaw and nose. Uh, and here I am, 18 years later, still being– I mean, I was in tears, I am not a brave man when it comes to dentistry. Still suffering, trying to get this problem solved once and for all. But hopefully we’re only one dental visit away. But then again, it’s far too soon to count the chickens. They have not yet hatched. How are you?
H: Good. I wanna ask you a quick question. Answer one of my questions, John. If you could, had the opportunity to, meet that bike messenger, would you? And if so, what would you say?
J: I mean, the thing is, I really, I genuinely don’t hold it against the bike messenger because I think that that bike messenger was forced by the nature of his profession to be going the wrong way down a one-way street at great speed, and to be fair to him, I was standing on the curb, and he had to bike, because of where the cars were, very near the curb. And he just didn’t notice me. I was reading a book, he was, you know, biking. His shoulder, my face. The one thing I do kind of wish is that maybe he had stopped. He did stop briefly; I lost consciousness for a little bit, and when I regained consciousness, I did see him, but the moment I started to get up, he biked away.
H: He was like, “well, I didn’t kill him, let’s move on.”
J: Yeah. It wasn’t, I mean, I honestly don’t bear him any ill will, it’s just funny– what’s that great Fitzgerald line about “you never know how much space you take up in other people’s lives?” Like, that bike messenger has no idea how central he has become to my personal narrative.
H: Oh man. Yeah, you never know, you never know.
Click to read quote
[Well,] you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.
John Green Reads Poetry 