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Reflection for October 16, 2005

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In the morning, In the evening, Ain't we got fun -

The year was 1917. A young lieutenant, stationed in Louisville, Kentucky prior to being sent overseas, was enjoying the socials put on by the local gentry for service men from Camp Taylor. The lieutenant's name was Jay Gatsby and he was especially struck by the beauty of a young debutante named Daisy Fay. He himself was from North Dakota and had been a teen-age vagabond before he became the factotum of a rich yacht owner and gained access to the wider world beyond the poverty of his childhood.

At one point in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby Jay tells his later friend Nick about his early and persistent dream to reach some pinnacle of happiness. And then along came this Daisy, this upper class beauty! Gatsby describes how one evening, as they walked down a residential sidewalk showing white in the moonlight, the lines on the sidewalk seemed to stretch away like the rungs of a ladder at the top of which he might one day "gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder". But suddenly he felt he didn't have to climb that far for when he kissed Daisy it was like all that wonder he aspired to had become incarnate in her

He was wrong, of course. Daisy's parents prevented her from eloping with Gatsby just prior to his embarking for France and in his absence Daisy married Tom Buchanan, an arrogant socialite from Chicago. But Gatsby's aspirations were not so easily extinguished. Feeling inferior because of his poor origin, Gatsby made wealth, even illegitimate wealth, his aim and by 1922 had acquired a mansion near Daisy and Tom's home on Long Island and along with it fancy cars, boats and closets full of the choicest shirts and suits - all in an effort to revive his dream of life with Daisy. He invited her to his mansion, gave her the grand tour, displayed his material possessions.

And she was impressed like any merely "material girl". The author tells of Jay's showing her his monogrammed shirts of coral hues and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, so that Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry: 'They're such beautiful shirts . . . It makes me sad because I've never seen such - such beautiful shirts before." He invited her and Tom to one of his many parties at which hundreds of freeloaders danced all night to music like: In the morning / In the evening, / Ain't we got fun. All to recover Daisy as the object of his fulfillment, although the real Daisy could never live up to what Gatsby incoherently longed for.

Some say Gatsby is really a metaphor of young America itself during the Roaring Twenties. In the 1800's before the auto and airplane and America's fast rise to become a world power, we had been a slow and easy country, traditional, rural, inclined to live in Victorian houses and go to county fairs. But no sooner did the 20th century get under way than speed and conspicuous consumption took over. At a killing pace we were now pursuing material dreams our forefathers never even imagined. And Fitzgerald suggests that like Jay Gatsby we too may be riding for a fall. For when we mistake the coin of Caesar and fleeting romance and McMansions for the object of our deepest desires, we may very well end up tragically disappointed.

Still, beyond that siren song that misleads the Jay Gatsbys of this world there may lie the genuinely seductive melody of the Holy Spirit calling us to reach beyond appearances of happiness to the real thing - a happiness grounded in the source of all our being. Perhaps that's what Gatsby himself really heard ever so faintly behind the feverishly warm voice of Daisy herself - the voice of God's own Spirit that "couldn't be over-dreamed" because it's the voice of "a deathless song".

-- Geoff Wood