“You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness.”

In anticipation of the upcoming Baz Luhrmann take on The Great Gatsby (which will be in 3D – something that I think will really set it apart from the Robert Redford/Mia Farrow version – it still won’t compare to the Nintendo Game, however) I reread the 1925 novel. It had been over a decade and I’d grown rusty on basic plot points, and almost completely forgotten the novel’s painfully beautiful prose. There is a reason it’s considered one of America’s greatest novels – in a paragraph Fitzgerald is able, sorcerer-like, to conjure a character so perfectly vivid that you feel you know him as well as your best friend. A lesser writer might have spent a hundred pages just describing Gatsby and still failed to evoke him as certainly.

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Unless that book is The Great Gatsby and unless that cover is this Art Deco masterpiece . . . in which case the cover pretty much lets you know what you’re in for.

To be fair, some of Gatsby’s hyperreality (and Fitzgerald’s genius) is the fact that he avoids, even when his mundane past is revealed, the concrete. He (as well as the novel’s other characters – the liar, the jock, the heiress, etc.) is a dreamlike archetype pinned down with a few abstractions but otherwise left for us to create and, to varying degrees, inhabit. The novel presents to the reader a finely tailored suit to try on and a luxurious mansion populated with starlets and industrialists in which to live. At first we all want to be Gatsby – he is mysterious, rich, attractive, humble, and he is almost certainly going to get the girl in the end.

The fact that Woody Allen was able to marry Mia Farrow is a comfort to neurotic dorks everywhere.

But then we realize that there’s something rotten – a vague scent, just the hint of an odor, but enough to taint even the most perfect of dishes. A shallow reading indicates that Gatsby’s problem is his affiliation with organized crime – but his peers are the 1%, and when have the superrich ever been troubled by illegality if the result is wealth? Likewise, the revelations about the lies and half-truths of his youth are hardly more shocking than the tales of murder and espionage that fueled his popularity amongst the gossip-hungry society set. Compared to his adulterous and boorish (the latter presented as a far greater sin in society) rival Tom, Gatsby’s sordid past and his criminal connections are hardly shocking or even particularly off-putting. Ultimately, we realize that Gatsby disquiets us because he is diseased, and that he is a victim not primarily of circumstance or of villainy (although perhaps of those things too) but of his own affliction. His illness, the malady that destroyed him more surely than any cancer, and the disease that gives the reader pause, is nostalgia.

This will definitely look way better in 3D. I expect the giant spectacles to practically jump out of the screen.

Just when I’m convinced that I’ve found the irreducible elemental particles from which the human condition is assembled; I’m reminded that many, perhaps most, people don’t think and feel the way that I do at all. So I’m going to resist the temptation to assume that you have as intimate a relationship with nostalgia as I do. I am not sure where cause and effect sit on the great wheel of personality tautology, but I do know that I grew up with a father who cared far more about Ancient Greece than football and a mother who decorated our Victorian house as if on any given afternoon we might receive a visit from a Lady who’d just strolled out of 1890. I’ve always felt more comfortable surrounded by objects far older than I, and I’ve developed an almost preternatural skill at getting my heart ripped out by archaeologists.

“The worst of life is beautiful; as it slips away in full retreat” – Joe Henry

No one provides a better visual accompaniment to the written world of Fitzgerald than Leyendecker.

But pain, particularly of the unrequitable nostalgic variety, is a special beast. I’ll defer to Don Draper from Mad Men on this one:

“But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate… but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, “nostalgia” literally means, “the pain from an old wound”. It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the Wheel. It’s called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again . . . to a place where we know we are loved.” – Don Draper

He’s playing a little loose with his translation here, as it would be more correct to say that it’s the pain of home(coming) or the pain from a home that one can’t come home to. That’s hair-splitting though, the point is that nostalgia is the pleasure/pain that comes from picking a scab, from feeding an old grudge, from looking at a photograph of a moment in time that will never, that can never, come again.  Any rational person would let it go – would stop thinking about a past that never was – but as someone who suffers from the same disease as Gatsby, I realize that’s easier said than done.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” – Percy Shelley

Why is there so much romantic appeal to lost civilizations? Is it because while we will never know them, they will also never disappoint us?

Gatsby could have fallen in love with the lying golfer or any of the starlets or heiresses who came out to his parties on West Egg – and it would have been love (or at least an infatuation) reciprocated. Moreover, while he may not really have been of the Oxbridge set, he certainly had enough imagination to compose a narrative out of whole cloth about linen-white wrists, eyes the color of loneliness, and a whisper-voice that only spoke in comforting lies and dishonest truths – a narrative to justify the love of a starlet as being as true as his love of Daisy.

But he didn’t. To do so would have been hard. It would have required that he surrender his perfect dream and interface with grim reality, at least long enough to compose a new drama about it. He opted for the easier path of clinging to an impossible unreal love for Daisy, he wouldn’t stop loving her, or at least wouldn’t stop loving the idea of being in love with her.

“I want to save you while there’s still something left to save.” – Rise Against

I get it. I understand the inability to let go of a love that isn’t real any longer. I see why one can’t kill the simulacra people who really only live in our heads. I appreciate the impossibility of ejecting philosophical systems that have never worked, but have been comfortably not working for a hundred years. I perfectly fathom the quest for the half-remembered pleasure that could only ever have existed as a fantasy. Figuring out how to live with that is what we nostalgics just have to deal with – like the phantom pain of an amputated limb.

Some analysts have suggested that Steampunk isn’t about nostalgia – I couldn’t disagree more. Nostalgia isn’t about a restoration of the past as it actually was, it’s about looking back with rose-tinted glasses to a lost time that never was. The very heart of Steampunk is nostalgia grown to colossal proportions. http://arts.in.ua/artists/woit/w/108039/

In this particular situation the question that’s lodged, fishhook-like, in my brain, is whether Gatsby’s failure to believe in that impossibility, the failure to understand that what he loved wasn’t the Daisy Buchanan of the present, or really even the Daisy Buchanan of the past, but a Daisy Buchanan carried from an imagined past into a parallel virtual present in which she might become a vessel for every other unrealized dream and desire, is what doomed Gatsby, or whether it saved him – at least for a while and if perhaps not in the way he would have chosen to be saved.

“We don’t even have pictures; just memories to hold; that grow sweeter each season; as we slowly grow old.” – Toad the Wet Sprocket

Nostalgia can be a drug, a Lethean cocktail that lulls us to sleep, disconnected from the present and dreaming of something that can never be. We can stare at the green light in East Egg so hard that we forget the shore on which we’re standing and stop living our real lives. And nostalgia, or the dissonance created from its collision with reality, can be a great destroyer – as it was in Gatsby’s case when the tragic reality of Daisy ran into his dream.

An Auburn 852 Speedster (on display at the beautiful Auburn/Duesenberg Museum in Indiana) – built in the 1930s, but nostalgia isn’t picky when re-inventing the past. Maybe everything would have worked out differently for Gatsby if he’d just been driving this.

But that nostalgia, the desire to craft an entire existence based on half-remembered preferences and the delusion that one could ever become what someone else wants rather than simply being it, also fueled the rise of this down-on-his-luck veteran into a millionaire or billionaire or whatever it was that Gatsby was. Could any realizable dream have driven him so hard? Would he have pursued any other vision, any vision that he could have actually achieved, with such ferocity? It’s true that it eventually drove him over a cliff, but it also carried him, like a barely contained locomotive (or Deusenberg) so much further than he had any right to go. Maybe he could have made it work if he’d met Daisy again before Tom entered the picture, or in any of a hundred other scenarios – but at some point it became unworkable, and Gatsby should have let it go. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t let something that he’d clung to as motivation for that long slip though his fingers.

“I never should’ve let you out my door; but now I’m stuck here with your photograph.” – Action Action

That, I think, is the tragedy and the lesson and the gift of Gatsby and of nostalgia. It can legitimately be a source of personal growth and transformation – or even societal transformation when the nostalgia is writ large (I’m thinking of the Renaissance and Enlightenment obsession with a perfect Classical world). Questing to recover something that never was can trick us into exploring and creating better lives for ourselves than we might otherwise have even been able to imagine. The peril is in being unable to awaken from the dream, particularly if it becomes a nightmare.

The Coxcomb staring across the water at an East Egg that’s only as real as I make it.

I’ve been known to spend a dangerous amount of time on West Egg. I tell myself that I’m becoming a better person as a result. I just hope that I’ll be able to let go of the historical fantasy when the time comes – or at least before I let Daisy crash my car.

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