“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
We finished our month of reading The Great Gatsby in our book club. I have a lot of thoughts about the novel, but for some reason it’s been difficult for me to write about. And since we are moving on to Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, I figure I should write something.
Of all of the themes of the novel, the one that spoke to me the most was the judgment of our narrator, Nick Carraway. I have to imagine that meant a lot to that post WW1 generation who may have picked up this novel. Those who had lived through those technological killing fields of the first world war’s trenches with the machine guns, tanks, gas and unceasing shelling. There was a metaphysical trauma left on them that all wars seem to leave in their wake, leaving a lost generation.
The novel ends with a metaphysical trauma, when the hope of Jay Gatsby is shattered on the violence of Tom Buchanan. Leaving Nick to put himself together, in the wake of the death of hope in Jay Gatsby at the hand of George Wilson, the unwitting man from the Valley of Ashes. As Nick stands at the near empty funeral of his friend, while Tom and Daisy disappear into their money, I can imagine a reader who survived the battlefields of Europe seeing themselves in Nick’s shoes.
And I do too, though from a far less of a dramatic vantage point. Sitting at this computer, in the wake of a Trump/Biden/Trump president cycle and the ripples of the Covid Years lapping against my memory, the specter of AI looming over the horizon, and the whole world order in flux. I look to Nick and I reserve judgment. Though I do observe… and like Nick I am both within and without. Not an impartial observer, I like Nick live amongst the participants, in a little cardboard box of a house in the shadow of waring castles. I walk along the right and left bank of the current, as Nick does in East and West Egg observing and testing the conduct of the participants. In the end, its the conduct that matters, not which side of the bay one has built their home on. As Nick says, “Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.”
This little work is a great declaration of war; and with regard to the cross-examining of idols, this time it is not the idols of the age but eternal idols which are here struck with a hammer as with a tuning fork,—there are certainly no idols which are older, more convinced, and more inflated. Neither are there any more hollow. This does not alter the fact that they are believed in more than any others, besides they are never called idols,—at least, not the most exalted among their number.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. Twilight of the Idols 1888
On to a Brave New World…
Leave a Reply