In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind of late.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. Sometimes a person is poor or sick, for example, or they’re ladies, or minorities, or are any of a dozen ways otherwise that make them undeserving of good fortune.
“Also, some of them,” he continued, “could have been bitten by a rabid werebeast of legend in some distant Balkan wood, could have been turned by this bite into a ravening monster and forced to live a life of dark, secret horror for the remainder of his years. A man cursed to spend each and every day with the scent of blood always in his nostrils, a craving for flesh forever barely restrained. A man thusly thrust to the periphery, to the shadowed edges of society, lest his bloodlust ever be unleashed, or his shame ever revealed.
“Just as a for instance.
“That probably won’t be relevant to you and your life, though.”
He was wrong, of course – on several fronts.
But then so was I.
My father and I have always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, by which I mean that he only ever spoke on the same minimum of topics, and I would never need listen to more than three words to know this. He often opened a story with similar bombast and intrigue only for the specifics to express themselves as far more quotidian, and even more elitist and prejudiced, and frequently with a pathological blindness to his own indigent standing, because my father was just that type of man. That he eventually took my silence as tacit approval and felt I agreed without further conversation was both blessing and bane.
I had presumed this particular advice was more of the same: one of his petty grievances dressed up in scandalous, yellow prose, designed not to educate but only to inflame. I paid it no mind. I wonder now if circumstances might have been different, if Lady Fate herself could have been swayed, had I been less dismissive of him – had I known then to believe in the magic and monsters of which he spoke.
The great irony, of course, is that in trying to prove myself a better man than my father, I became something of a collector of the very tall tales he told, inching blissfully and ignorantly closer to those shadowed boundaries that separate society’s fictions from actual fact. Because so many of his stories were lies, and because the very core of my youth was invariably tied up in these twisted falsehoods, I found myself frequently seeking out the stories of others in the hope that, somewhere, I might find the truth, the Platonic ideals of beauty and truth that held the real meaning of the world. It was a hobby that became a habit, and then quite possibly something more.
And so it came about that in college and after, I was unjustly accused of being a politician, glad-handing my way through schoolmates for my own personal gain, or alternately regarded as a wandering Scheherazade, a drifter of infinite patience and nearly as many narratives, willing to listen to soaring sagas of impossible adventure or low rumbles of salt-stained heartache for only the price of a meal or a place to lay my head. However you choose to see it, I was in this way privy to the secret griefs of many a wild man and unknowable woman. Only now, with the benefit of years, am I able to recognize that I was chasing the demons of strangers as a way to ignore my own. That at least might explain the lengths to which I ultimately went in pursuit of vicariousness.
There is after all a certain thrill that comes from hearing another’s most darkened desires, their secret-self confided – but what is a thrill if not the promise of peril, the creeping inevitability of woe. A gamble. A hand that, sooner or later, will come up short.
And there is only so much that a man can lose.
As such, when I came back from the East that autumn, I held the strange desire that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever. I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart – my own simply could not contain any more hurt.
There are only two exempt from my reaction, though it could easily be argued that they are the ones most responsible for it. A woman, the most perfect ever to walk this callous earth, and Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book – Gatsby, a man so cruelly afflicted with love and ambition and other ailments unnamed, a man to be lauded and pitied and heaped with unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to life, as if he could sense it, smell it, were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. He had an extraordinary gift for hope, a desperate desire and romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person.
And which, dear reader, it is not likely I shall ever find again.
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