To Love or To Be Loved: Musings on The Great Gatsby

Dear Gatsby,

I finally read your book. And I was surprised, for though I had read a number of reviews, articles, etc., I was not prepared for your emotion, your love. I suppose that F. Scott Fitzgerald would lead us to believe that your love was more obsession than love. Poor Gatsby, yes, there was obsession, but obsession is also the dark way of unrequited love.

And your love led me to thinking about a question. "Is it better to love or to be loved?" Of course, one always hopes to have the beautiful combo, to both love and be loved in return, in equal measure. But that is a distant dream, and one that does not always come to pass. And often, even in great loves and wonderful relationships, the scales of love tip one way, and sometimes back and forth, but rarely do they balance steadily over time.

To be loved is like receiving a beautiful gift. It is like an equity, an account that can be drawn upon. How terrific is that? To be truly loved is to know that at any moment you have someone to lean on emotionally, financially, spiritually, socially, in sickness and in health. That is amazing capital. To be loved is, in some ways, to be free of loneliness. It is to have some center where you know your heart will always be welcome, like a home. To be loved is to have available the resources of some other heart, to have access to some other set of perspectives, to have someone whose eyes will never turn away, as yours, Gatsby, never strayed from the green light on the dock across the water. To be loved is to have in this world, two cubic cubits of space (Exodus 30) upon which there is a continual incense burning, raising you to God, seeking your good. (Now, two cubic cubits is not everything, but it is something.) And to continue this analogy, to be loved, is to have someone who would, if need be, once a year, provide the blood for your atonement, or as Jesus put it, would "lay down his life" for you. (John 15) That is what it is like to be loved.

And there is only one thing that is better. That is to love. For to love is to live on the very edge of the precipice of life. Loving another is very risky business. It is betting the entire wad on one horse. To love is to give full rein to another being, come what may. To love is not to gain access, but to give access. It is an extremely involved state of being. Loving is making provision, giving, praying, enjoying, grieving, and accepting. Loving is remaining open in the face of both the open and the closed of another. Loving is patience and kindness and seeing no evil. Loving precludes selfishness and anger and making the other person see your point of view. Loving sometimes has to be pretty invisible to actually be, truly, love. And loving remains even when being loved is gone, hoping and believing. In a way, loving carries a vital eternality that exists no where else, even in being loved.

Why, you may ask, Gatsby, is this better than being loved? I'm not sure why, but it is. It is. Perhaps your love might have been a more successful venture, if you had not demanded the return. If you had accepted the lot of the loving, without the lot of loved. Still, I did appreciate the love that you nurtured, and it was, perhaps, your only true thing.

Betsy

The Advent: Nativity by Gustav Doré

Dear David,

Thank you for this nativity scene. It is one of my favorite illustrations from one of my favorite acquisitions of this year, i.e. The Dover production of The Doré Bible Illustrations, the 241 electrotype woodcut plates from La Sainte Bible of 1865. Once again we can thank the French for something of remarkable beauty and memorable magnitude.

And I thank you for finding this wonderful volume for me in the dusty piles of Betty’s Antique Store in Lenoir City (pronounced not as in the French tradition, but as the first half of the way George Strait might call one or the other of two roadies standing, smoking, behind the Yamaha mixer, ”Len or Billy Bob, get that Guild for me, will ya?”) Betty’s is closed now. I’m not sure what happened, no giant sale like the Brown Squirrel runs every couple of months, "Last Chance before Closing!" But she is really out of business, empty windows, empty floor, nothing but the sign to remind us of the treasures that once were available behind the chipped china display around the corner from the pile of old Saturday Evening Posts.

But back to the subject. The wonder of the Doré book for me (and for folks of my age category) is, as stated in the intro to it. “There can be little doubt that these engravings . . . have fixed the iconography of Bible in our minds.” I would say, “my age and tradition” but you are not of my religious tradition, and you recognized it’s classic import right away. The pictures in this black and white volume take me to the remembrances of the stories of the Bible, The Brazen Serpent, David and Goliath (replete with gory decapitation), Daniel in the Den of Lions, Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery, Jesus and the Disciples Going to Emmaus, various images of the Crucifixion, and of course this one, The Nativity. I’d say even younger folks have been impacted by the works of this masterpiece from 1865, (Can any good thing come out of the 1860’s?) because so much of the biblically-related artistic imagination of the 20th century found its roots here in the pages of the Doré Bible.

Back to this image of the advent--It is such a nice one. Men and women who are quite authentic in their response to a baby, haloing around the Christ child. Is Joseph napping? The animals are precious too. The little one reminds me of the lamb we had once, Baa-aa-b. You didn’t know us then, but Cate will doubtless remember.

Well, in all my thinking about advent this year, I have enjoyed considering it in light of this image best of all. And I have this image thanks to you. We will have to go antiquing again real soon!!!

May your holiday be wonderful. Hope to see you soon.

Betsy