Shadow and Light - reflections on The Great Gatsby

I couldn’t sleep this morning, and after staring at the ceiling for awhile decided to get up and put the kettle on, pour a mug of hot tea, and write about what is on my mind.

I went to the theatre last evening and watched the film “The Great Gatsby,” a piece that takes place amidst the northeast metropolitan society of 1922.

Having never read the original novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I went into the story not knowing anything about the characters. What I found was a straightforward narrative told from the first person view of Nicholas “Nick” Carraway, a recent college graduate, about himself and Jay Gatsby, a young self-made entrepreneur with a rare awareness of life, who became neighbors and formed a strong bond as they navigated society and the world around them. There was also a primary female character, Nick’s cousin Daisy, a beautiful young socialite who had the capacity to be a graceful, strong woman, but who had developed a warped view of the world.

Nick started out with a dream to be a writer, but then got sidetracked by a life he thought he wanted seeking wealth, and got caught up in the lives of those around him, dazzled by the false-light of bloated living and the shiny facade of decadence that thinly veiled the other side of the coin on which existed the shadowed corners of lives lived in secret.

Gatsby was an ever hopeful glass half-full entrepreneur, who was born into a very poor family and fought to achieve everything by tenacity and hard work; he had survived poverty, and war, and become a self made man of wealth and achievement; he had developed a reputation for giving lavish parties every week for whoever would come, and hundreds of strangers would show up to his house to be entertained; yet he was quiet and withdrawn and rarely came out to greet them or show up in public.

Nick, fresh out of college and with a new job selling bonds in the city, moved into a tiny old gardener’s cottage situated in between the lavish properties of the wealthy in a small village area on Long Island, which was across the bay from his cousin Daisy’s grand home, and consequently, next door to the great house that Gatsby lived in. As the story unfolded, Nick learned that Gatsby had met Daisy five years before when he was in the army, and they had been in love; but then Gatsby was sent overseas during World War I, and when he came back, he wanted to make his fortune before offering her a life with him. But she did not wait long; she fell for Thomas “Tom” Buchanan, a dishonest man from old money, a sportsman who dazzled her with wealth and a voracious appetite for conquering life at any cost.

Just after moving in, Nick meets Gatsby by attending one of his parties; as he gets to know him, Nick learns that Gatsby is still in love with Daisy and that she has no idea he lives across the bay from her. Everything he had acquired – his property, cars, clothes, the parties – he didn’t care about any of it. He bought the lavish property just so he could be near her. He had only given the parties in hopes that she would attend. He had endlessly striven to secure a fortune so he would feel he was enough for her. Everything within the five years between their last parting and the present moment was done in hopes that he would be reunited with her and all would be as before. But she had changed. He loved her to the point of distraction, or an idea of her, not realizing that she had shifted deep inside and become infected with the same silent sickness of selfishness and mediocrity that lived in those she surrounded herself with. She had become too shallow, living a life two inches below the surface while he beckoned for her to come out to the deeper waters; but she would not go, and ultimately chose not to see, not to hear, and to become blind to a deeper understanding of what life and love are really about, and devastating consequences ensued.

There is a scene that stood out to me, where Nick, after a wild party in the city, disheveled and disquieted, looked out from the apartment he was at onto to the windows of other apartment buildings around him, thinking about all the different people living behind the glassed panes. He imagined that a naïve version of himself, the way that he was in the beginning, was looking up from the sidewalk onto those same windows. As he stood there he thought to himself, “I was within, and without,” realizing the conflict that he was feeling over his current life, and what he had seen and experienced in recent days through the troubled lives of those around him. I understood what he meant. It is the realization that “all that glitters is not gold” (William Shakespeare); it is the moment when something inside of us switches on, and we realize that something is wrong with the picture we find ourselves in, and the image begins to show cracks, exposing the illusion behind the magic trick.

Yes, this is a film. These are not real characters. But the writer of the original novel that was made into this film was real, and he obviously had something to say about the perils of navigating society and human nature. This is not an old problem. These same sicknesses of the heart have been around since the beginning.

This story felt very much like a warning to me to keep the eyes clear, the ears listening intently, and to be aware and alert because the infection is all around us every day and has been since the beginning. Greed, selfishness, lies, falsity, illusions; toxicities that can only be exuded by a deeper understanding of what our lives are meant to be for.

We are all of us meant to live in the light; a light that is in us and through us and comes from something greater than ourselves; we are meant to be like prisms that refract the light into a hundred different colors that dance about everywhere we go and chase away the shadows that lurk in dark corners seeking to overtake and bring us down, like leeches waiting to latch onto our heels at any opportunity and drain the life out of us, darkening our vision and dulling our senses.

This story was about truth and illusion, shadow and light; beautifully told through the eyes of the narrator, a man who survived the epidemic and came out changed forever.