“My life has got to be like this. It’s got to keep going on.” — Jay Gatsby
“What’s the point?” — My wife
I first read The Great Gatsby when I was a sophomore at Taylor University at the behest of a religion student with a military-neat room across the second floor of Wengatz Hall. He claimed I would like it. I claimed to have read it in high school. I lied. I’m sure he knew. I probably read a chapter or two, at most.
I think he thought I would like it because I felt like Taylor was a school that had 1,100 rich kids and 100 football players. He knew I was one of the 100 football players who, like the other 99, had come from either the middle of a cornfield or from the city and probably not from a lot of money. Perhaps he sensed the fact that I felt estranged from all the Lexuses in the parking lot, and all the North Face Jackets and Ski Trips who lived in our dormitory. Perhaps he thought I would resonate with the Jay Gatsby character and all of the striving and money-chasing and Daisy-Buchanan-wooing.
He was right. I did resonate with Jay Gatsby, and while my life has stopped a little bit short of bootlegging and Meyer Wolfsheim and mansions on West Egg, it has still had its fair share of chasing after the wind.
My friend and I wanted to conquer the world and then woo our Daisy Buchanans.
Idols and Hope
If you’ve seen the movie and read the book or have at least claimed to have read the book and then seen the movie (sheepish) you know that Gatsby (spoiler alert) grew up poor, glommed onto the right rich person, became rich himself through questionable means, and then set about trying to woo the woman whom he placed on a pedestal and made into a living, breathing messiah.
The fact that I saw that same(ish) narrative play out at my upscale Christian college is beside the point. People glom onto people for a variety of reasons, and usually that reason is money.
If you’ve seen the movie or read the book you know that ultimately all the money and all the charm and all the “hope” in the world couldn’t woo Daisy, who ended up having even more questionable character than Gatsby. He asked her to say that she had never loved anyone in the world besides Gatsby. What Gatsby wanted was Daisy’s eternal, holy, and un-divided worship, and she knew that it wasn’t within her to give that. He idolized her, and in turn wanted her to do the same.
And then, beautifully but sadly, the consequences of sin played out onscreen as Tom Buchanan’s mistress ran to her death in front of the car Daisy was driving, and then Gatsby himself was gunned down by the woman’s irate and revenge-sick husband. As Nick Carraway plunged into the kind of depression and alcoholism that often plagues people who think at length about things, Tom and Daisy Buchanan escaped to a world of punishment that included, primarily, the fact that they were sentenced to a life of living with each other.
Never Works
When my wife asked “What’s the point?” afterward I didn’t know what to tell her. Later, we decided that the point, simply, is that the wages of sin is death. The movie doesn’t deal at all with eternal punishment, but it deals beautifully with the fact that we have to live with ourselves, on this earth, when we realize that all the money, sex, romance, and adoration the world can bestow can’t do it for us. When we realize it never works.
The filmmakers want us to think Gatsby is the hero because he died with “hope.” But we know he died a minute or two before he realized it was Nick Carraway on the phone and not Daisy. He died a few days before he had to see Daisy and Tom pack their car and leaving their mansion for parts-unknown. Or, at most, he died a few years before he saw that Daisy’s true character was human, flawed, and imperfect—just like his.
What he had wasn’t hope. What he had was a lack of knowledge.
Nature of the Business
The religion student across the hall became my best friend. We speak at least once a week. He pastors a small church and, like me, he really hasn’t conquered anything. We both married women who, thankfully, aren’t much like Daisy Buchanan.
I now, ironically, make my living selling books to the selfsame North Faces and Lexuses and Ski Trips who I used to secretly envy on the way to the dining commons. I still don’t sell quite enough of them to finance the kind of Ski-Trip-Lexus-and-Jesus lifestyle that was fashionable at my school. And at this point it’s bad for business for me to admit that said lifestyle still makes me a little sick.
It would be good for business for me to make friends with the kinds of college presidents, conference speakers, consultants, pro athletes, book-blurbers, and independently wealthy Christian businessmen who can make my life easier. For some reason I’ve always been bad at that.
At this point in the essay it would be customary to say that I wouldn’t trade my humble existence for anything, though if I wrote that I would be lying as much as I used to lie about having read the novel. The fact of the matter is, I would like to be a little more impressive and a little more successful. Not Gatsby-esque, necessarily, but a little more. And then when I got my little more, I would want a little more after that. That’s the nature of my business—really, the nature of any business.
When I was young and cynical, I used to say to my wife, “You really can buy people’s respect.” What I was really saying to her is, “I hope to one day have enough money that we can buy everyone’s respect.” I now see the folly of that goal, because while it might be true and probably is—I see a new example of it almost every year in my business—it can’t buy me the one thing that matters: freedom from guilt and communion with my Savior.
Gatsby couldn’t buy eternal life. He couldn’t love his way into eternal life either. He couldn’t keep his life on an upward trajectory out of the sheer force of his will and charm, any more than you or I can. The movie reminded me that I am only here—living, breathing, writing, teaching, fathering, and so on—by the grace of God.
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
