I read
The Great Gatsby this week, and that's got me thinking a lot about the ideals that we construct for ourselves. See, Jay Gatsby isn't really Gatsby at all. His name is James Gatz, and Gatsby is just his constructed persona-- the summation of all of his 17-year-old aspirations of money, influence, sophistication, and charm. The thing is, everything that he lives for-- everything that he is or represents-- is an empty shell, an arbitrary abstraction of what he is to become. He spends the entire story trying to convince himself that he has, indeed, attained that unattainable dream, reached that great summit that he had so long before imagined, but in the end, the dream falls apart; the reality of his situation is brought to light, and he is left all alone.
I've asked myself often,
'For what and/or whom do you live?' and I find myself answering differently each time. I guess you could say that at one point in my life, I had my own Jay Gatsby that I had built up for myself: he was quick-witted and dagger-tongued, cynical yet a hopeless romantic, a perfect intellectual, an overt critic, a part-time philosopher, and an aspiring novelist. He wrote lots of first pages of books and told people that he was writing a novel. He knew all about Kant and Jung and Heidegger-- that, perhaps was one of his more real faces. He read every long book that he could get his hands on and made a point of informing everyone that he not only had read them but also thoroughly enjoyed each and considered it one of his favorites. And it's easy to sound smart when you know a little bit about something to which others are entirely ignorant. It's like the kid in your 9th grade class who is fluent in five languages because he knows how to say three sentences-- that is, until someone who speaks Portuguese shows up, and then he's only fluent in four languages.
I think I first
saw myself one day in high school when my friend, Abigail, asked me for help on a homework assignment. I remember that she turned to me at one point and said, "Greg, don't take this the wrong way, but you can be really condescending at times. That's why we don't usually ask for your help." At first I was kind of taken aback, and the holographic image that was ever before my eyes lost focus for a moment; all I could see was a little kid who was kind of afraid and pretty lonesome, but then the stabilizer came back online with a string of self-justifications, and the image was back again.
I've changed a lot over the past six or seven years, and while I can't say that I'm free from hypocrisy or unkindness or pride, life has had its way of peeling back some of the dragon's scales. It's never much fun at first, but then the hologram comes down, and you start to see things in color again. Sometimes, you can distinguish a faint shimmer or a quiet whirr about others-- as if they have some little hologram generator as well--, and you think to yourself about what you once were and what you've become. And you're glad for who you are, and you feel, if only for an instant, that that little kid inside you has grown up a little bit. He's learned a lot, and he yet has a lot to learn before he becomes what he is truly meant to become... but he realizes above all that
it's always better to be you, with all the flaws and weaknesses and sorrows, too...
