Don Mann: Focusing on my Craft

Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2004 - 4:45 a.m.

I've just finished my third reading of The Great Gatsby, and this time through has left me just as crushed and disoriented as the first two.

If you haven't read the book I implore you to do so, if only for the opportunity to experience a piece of life you (hopefully) will never have to survive.

With each reading I've found a new way to relate to the novel, this time with the confused and single-minded James Gatz himself, a man so bent on achieving his dreams that he allows them to grow and expand until a real goal is no longer in view, just a ghostly image of something he once believed was real.

The instant that his whole world was turned upside-down was perfectly captured in the following passage...

"One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. 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.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete...."

He cherished this moment so much and exaggerated its significance to such an extent that it controlled him. Reading this passage crushed me, because I realized that in all my exaggerated ramblings of my experiences I too have placed this kind of reverie on events I deemed crucial and sentimental. The book is almost a warning to dreamers, hopeless romantics, and the narrow-minded. It warns us that if our vision is allowed to be clouded by our own reveries, that if we put too much of our concentration on a single topic, we will lose a part of ourselves in the process. From that moment on Gatsby did everything and anything he could for Daisy, when in truth she was no more spectacular than the dozens of faceless floosies(sp?) which flooded his dinner parties. Her greed and her egotism were completely upstaged by his reverence for her...and thus he destroyed himself in an attempt to attain the woman he saw and not the woman who she really was.

I can only imagine the devestating blow dealt by the realization that his world was crumbling, when he finally figured out that her one passion in life was not his success but her own hedonistic materialism. She never loved him, she was in love with the highest bidder, and always would be, but he always KNEW in his heart that she was not. In that sense Gatsby knew less than nothing about the woman he wanted more than anything...

In the conflict between the heart and the mind, only a balance will suffice. Following your heart entirely could lead you straight into Gatsby's abyss, a cruel fate which killed his legacy, but not the man...because the man had already died so many years before, on the night that seemed too full, brimming to the top with possibilities and opportunity.

I implore you all to read the book, because it can demonstrate a lesson you never want to have to learn the hard way...

Delve Into The Past - Onward Into The Future