"Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees..."

"... he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder."

This is some crazy surrealism, in our Gatsby sentence today. (In the Gatsby project, we look, each day, at a single isolated sentence from "The Great Gatsby.") But let's settle down and understand what we are looking at. It's Gatsby's visual perspective. "Out of the corner of his eye" cues us that it's subjective and distorted. He's looking at the sidewalk and the perception is that it looks like a ladder. We're told that it really is a ladder, but we know that's not true. It really is a sidewalk, but to Gatsby subjectively, it's a ladder. Gatsby imagines himself climbing somewhere. Mounting. It's a secret place.

"... he could climb to it, if he climbed alone..." — I want to say that the illusion only remains intact if Gatsby is alone. And the vision, if he can hold himself within it, is of climbing that ladder up through the trees and then finally coming alive.

It's a vision of being born, just by walking down that sidewalk. And then he could be alive. He'd suck on the maternal breast, the pap of life. He wants to gulp it down — that incomparable milk of wonder.

He's just a man on a sidewalk. There's no ladder. He's already born and living in real life. But somehow it seems that real life is out there, unreachable. But if only you could get there, above the trees, you would drink it down. Incomparable! Wonderful!

***

Everybody's looking 4 the ladder
Everybody wants salvation of the soul

ADDED: I can see in the comments that some readers really do have trouble mentally picturing a sidewalk looking like a ladder. I don't want to get too laborious and pedantic with these Gatsby posts, but the lines on the sidewalk correspond to the rungs of a ladder. The path stretched out ahead, even when it's flat, seems to go upward. Look at a photograph of a sidewalk. Further down the road is higher in the picture. If trees line the sidewalk, then the "ladder" appears to climb up into the trees as it disappears behind the foliage. I called the sentence "crazy surrealism," but Gatsby isn't hallucinating. He's seeing an optical illusion.