Gatsby again
Yes, yes, we'll come to Saddam later, but we don't want to spoil the morning by thinking of that very wicked man and the mass graves he filled with his victims, do we? Instead, we're kicking off today with a Rainy Day perennial, The Great Gatsby. An e-mail from James Graham is responsible this time as he alerted us to the fact that yesterday in the Washington Post Jonathan Yardley termed F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, "The Greatest of Them All". Says Yardley:
In an extraordinarily compressed space -- the novel is barely 50,000 words long -- Fitzgerald gives us a meditation on some of this country's most central ideas, themes, yearnings and preoccupations: the quest for a new life, the preoccupation with class, the hunger for riches and "the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."That famous passage -- every passage in "Gatsby" is famous -- is on the novel's final page, near the end of six pages of prose so incandescent as, in my case quite literally, to send shivers down the spine.
This is indeed the truth. Yardley adds that if "from all of our country's books I could have only one, 'The Great Gatsby' would be it", and he concludes his meditation with an excerpt, of which he observes: "Those words, and the few hundred others that follow as the novel reaches its end, seem to me now -- eight decades after that imagined first reading -- the most beautiful, compelling and true in all of American literature. Each reading of them is a revelation and a gift." Because the passage is so seasonal and sensational, it's worth repeating:
"One of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. . . . When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again."
Yardley writes, "If in 1925 I didn't gasp at that, there would have been something seriously wrong with me." Same goes for 2007. James Graham says of Gatsby, "Although I don't read much fiction I've decided to give it a second reading." You won't regret it, James. It is the greatest.
