Blog Elements

As the school year comes to and end and summer break begins for most of you, the words of “Uncle” Walt Whitman seem especially appropriate:

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

Have a wonderful summer. Experience dirt between your toes, sunlight on your faces, and wisdom in your minds.

Prompted by the Baz Luhrman film, there has been a great deal of discussion about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby lately. Austin Allen at the Big Think offers a defense of the work:

Gatsby is not only a dissection of the American Dream but of dreams in general: their terrible necessity, their built-in futility. Its best lines on the subject–“the high price of living too long with a single dream”; “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired”; “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart”–have an almost scriptural quality, resonating far beyond their immediate context.

It’s also a particularly trenchant study of male desire, male illusion. Although the female characters in Gatsby don’t exactly come out looking well, there’s something ferocious about the way the book skewers men. What is Gatsby’s house but a failed mating display, one of the most extravagant in literature? Is there a harsher portrait of waning virility than Tom Buchanan: insecure bully and womanizer, “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax”? Meanwhile George Wilson is a hysterical cuckold, and even Nick cuts a slightly Prufrockian figure, looking forward at thirty to “a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”