Saturday Rave: New York Weather by F Scott Fitzgerald.

This passage is from a rather mad short story by F Scott Fitzgerald called O Russet Witch!.

It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows - it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of the sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven, and felt that now surely the farce was to close, and presently all the buildings would collapse like card houses and pile up in a dusty, sardonic heap upon all the millions who presumed to wind in and out of them.

It's almost enough to make you fall in love with bad weather, isn't it.

Fabulous.


New York, 1931, U.S. National Archives

Word To Use Today: desolate. This exquisite word comes from the Latin dēsōlāre, to leave alone, from sōlāre, to make lonely or lay waste, from sōlus, alone.