In his 1934 essay “Sleeping and Waking,” Fitzgerald, a well-known alcoholic and occasional insomniac, noticed that insomnia arrives when “seven valuable hours of sleep immediately break in two. There may be, if one is fortunate, the ‘first candy sleep of evening’ and the final deep sleep of morning, however between the 2 seems a sinister, ever widening interval.”
When I’m caught in such a widening interval, I flip to “Gatsby.” Listening at midnight with my eyes closed, nothing obstructs Fitzgerald’s prose. I can not skip a phrase or line; every one performs into the opposite, and I lay in mattress like a spellbound youngster who has heard his favourite story a thousand occasions.
One evening final summer time, I fell asleep to “Gatsby” and dreamed I used to be at my uncle’s sparsely attended funeral. My uncle was a self-made man; we had grown shut, and I got here to think about him like an older brother. He was somebody I admired and relied on. He died by suicide in 1991, and it modified my life without end — simply as, in a manner, Nick’s life modified after Gatsby’s dying. Like Nick, I “closed out my curiosity within the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of males.”
After 50,000 minutes, the novel has turn into many issues to me: an epic poem, a hard-boiled chivalric fable, a story through which all of the heroic and extraordinary deeds appear trendy for being ironic, together with the lesson that greatness lies previously — starting with the “vanished timber” that “made manner for Gatsby’s home” — but all of the heroic efforts to recapture it are doomed. “Gatsby” is populated by folks pushed, to at least one extent or one other, by goals of what they’ve misplaced or what they’ve by no means discovered, and I relate to that. “Waste and horror,” as Fitzgerald as soon as wrote; “What I might need been and achieved that’s misplaced, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I may have acted thus, kept away from this, been daring the place I used to be timid, cautious the place I used to be rash.”
When will I cease listening? Not any time quickly. Listening to “Gatsby” for 5 years has allowed me to really feel that I’ve come to know Fitzgerald higher, and myself, too. Moreover, even after 100 years and 200 listens, I don’t need to say goodbye. None of us do.
