In his 1934 essay “Sleeping and Waking,” Fitzgerald, a famous alcoholic and occasional insomniac, observed that insomnia arrives when “seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the ‘first sweet sleep of night’ and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval.”
When I am stuck in such a widening interval, I turn to “Gatsby.” Listening in the dark with my eyes closed, nothing obstructs Fitzgerald’s prose. I cannot skip a word or line; each one plays into the other, and I lay in bed like a spellbound child who has heard his favorite story a thousand times.
One night last summer, I fell asleep to “Gatsby” and dreamed I was at my uncle’s sparsely attended funeral. My uncle was a self-made man; we had grown close, and I came to think of him like an older brother. He was someone I admired and relied on. He died by suicide in 1991, and it changed my life forever — just as, in a way, Nick’s life changed after Gatsby’s death. Like Nick, I “closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
After 50,000 minutes, the novel has become many things to me: an epic poem, a hard-boiled chivalric fable, a tale in which all the heroic and extraordinary deeds seem modern for being ironic, including the lesson that greatness lies in the past — beginning with the “vanished trees” that “made way for Gatsby’s house” — yet all the heroic efforts to recapture it are doomed. “Gatsby” is populated by people driven, to one extent or another, by dreams of what they have lost or what they have never found, and I relate to that. “Waste and horror,” as Fitzgerald once wrote; “What I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was rash.”
When will I stop listening? Not any time soon. Listening to “Gatsby” for five years has allowed me to feel that I have come to know Fitzgerald better, and myself, too. Besides, even after 100 years and 200 listens, I don’t want to say goodbye. None of us do.
#Opinion #Ive #Listened #Great #Gatsby #Times #Heres #Learned
