Journal of a Soul 63

From the Ashes of Despair

It's hard to know where to start.  Like drawing a circle, I suppose one can put the compass point anywhere on a sheet of paper, set the radius randomly and start at any point to describe it.  Writing about the Soul or Self or Meaning, or lack of any one or all of them, is somewhat similar, I guess.  The alcoholic writer, Charles Bukowski, whom 1986 Time called a "laureate of American lowlife," described despair as only an alcoholic could as: “my beer-drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.”  What, I hear you chorus in response to these words brings you to write about despair?  Well, I suppose when we are inundated on all sides by pain, suffering, dying, death, war and destruction we can be forgiven for at least being a little sad.  What motivates these thoughts forming themselves in words upon this virtual screen is the well publicized death of the brilliant, inimitable actor and stand-up comic Robin Williams, whom the director Steven Spielberg has described as "a lightning storm of comic genius" and the on-going murder of innocents in Gaza, not to mention other places in the world that we forget so easily where such wanton killings of innocents continue to scar and mar the human face of the world.  We forget these poor souls because other more recent horrific news gains sway in the headlines. As I type these poor inadequate words, I am listening to a live radio show here in Dublin, Ireland where parents, sons and daughters and siblings are describing their pain at the suicide of one of their relatives.  If anything, the late great, wonderful human being Robin Williams is still touching our lives all over the world by helping raise our consciousness of this issue. Robin Williams R.I.P.

No Substitute for Experience

The subtitle here says it all, I think.  There is, indeed, no substitute for first hand experience.  Also to sound a very old tune in these pages the cerebral or intellectual only captures such a small, albeit a significant part, of the human phenomenon.  There are so many other dimensions of that phenomenon that can only be described after one has experienced them. These are all those non-cerebral, non-intellectual sides to our character like relationships, experiences of beauty, truth, love, compassion, companionship, care, love, hope, spirit, genius, laughter, genius and even that spark of madness all of which Robin Williams so much embodied in his sheer humanity.  And to that list, dare I say it, I must, of course, add despair.

I have said that there is no substitute for experience.  I have also written about my own experience of clinical depression when I was 40 years of age, now some 16 years ago.  That place or space was one where there was no soul, no meaning, no self.  That was a place or space of despair that only seven weeks hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital could mend. Thankfully, due to medical intervention, I have never had the experience of revisiting either the hospital or that space or place of pain since.  Important here has been a comprehensive understanding of the nature of depression which can be (i) of the clinical or endogenous variety (in other words, a biochemical disorder that can be corrected as far as possible by pharmacological intervention or medication) and (ii) the reactive variety where our life situation brings us down.  In this second variety, counselling and therapeutic intervention are very effective, though sometimes prescribed drugs can help to kick start the process, medicines that can later be withdrawn.  Also, I find that in the case of clinical depression, care of the soul through the creative arts and reading and attending self-help courses also helps.  The worst thing for anyone who knows anyone who is depressed  is to offer them cheap black and white advice.  There is no simple answer as depression varies from person to person in its symptoms, and a "both/and" and not an "either/or" response is the correct approach with regards to medical and therapeutic interventions and helps.

In matters of the mind, cheap advice can be useless at best and destructive at worst.  In all cases I have found that to be with and to accompany others in their crisis is the right approach.  What's said, in the end, does not matter much.  Being there is what matters. It's about presence or being present with others who suffer.  Of course, that is more easily said than done.  The accompanying person or companion will often feel helpless and so useless and more often than not seemingly ignored as the poor wretch suffering their despair simply cannot respond or reach out because they are not able to.

Falling Apart

Often in these times I find turning to poetry one of my resources.  Again, at the risk of repetition ad nauseam in these pages, let me come to William B. Yeats.  He wrote a wonderful poem in 1919, shortly after the ending of The Great War called "The Second Coming", some appropriate lines of which I will quote here:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

While Yeats spoke about the disintegration of the outer world in the wake of the Great War, the lines touch and move me on a personal existential level of inner disintegration and inner falling apart.  To that extent those words of Yeats are really very apt indeed. In this experience of inner disintegration, I am so much reminded of other lines from the wonderful father of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard that run:

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.” 

                            (― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death)

Pulling the Parts Together: Standing Together in Hope

Early Christian thinker, Origen, 185 - 254 A.D.

This is so hard to do and so much easier said, so the naivete of the subtitle here has to be forgiven, at least momentarily.  If anything, we humans have to learn over and over again the lesson of our brittleness as human beings. Too often, we believe the myths we have created about our power over all things and even, God help us, our power over ourselves. The old writers and artists often got it right: An early Christian theologian, Origen, presented a response to the problem of evil which cast the world as a schoolroom or hospital for the soul. It is interesting to note that the great Romantic poet John Keats saw the world as the "vale of soul-making" and his thoughts were very much in line with those of Origen.  In other words, to be truly human is to be a carer, a nurse, a doctor or a paramedic for each other.  To be truly human we must be soul-makers, not soul-breakers.  Too much of modern life is into soul-breaking rather than soul-making. To be a soul-maker is to be a compassionate healer.  The answer is seen in all the ways we can become caring communities rather than anonymous urban sprawls that dislocate and break souls down. Indeed, pulling the parts together is no easy task.  We live in a world that almost prefers disintegration to integration.  We care little about others, especially strangers.  We care little even about our neighbours, and often even less about ourselves.  Anonymity is seemingly preferred to being accepted as belonging. Indeed, it is so hard to put down roots in the masonry and concrete of our modern cities.  And yet there are so many reasons to hope as is shown in these two wonderful videos I am placing here below. The first is the moving video of the meeting of two wonderful young human beings one a Palestinian American and the other a Jewish American, both of whom were beaten up by Israeli police at various times in the last several years. Its viewing brought tears of hope and peace and brotherhood to my eyes.  The second is even more moving recent video as the human hands of love speak so powerfully by scratching at the earth and lifting stones and rubble to bring a wonderful little child back to the fresh invigorating air of life. My heart breaks in hope for our stained humanity.  Maybe the youngsters of today will teach their children better than we have done ours: (i)Two Modern Heroes and Healers  and (ii) The Healing Hands of Love.

Journal of a Soul 61

Dealing with Pain 2

As Robert Frost once answered to the question of what he had learnt from life - "It goes on!"
The ships still sail no matter how sad we are!

It is always so hard to write something new, and certainly more difficult still to write something insightful and profound about the subject of pain.  This particular post will only attempt to continue to flesh out what I said in my last post, and try to tease out this subject from some other angles.  Qoheleth of the Old Testament, being a good skeptic, doubted that there is very much new under the sun.  However, he did not take into account the fact that while a problem or a particular issue may seem to be the same old thing yet again that there is a myriad of new and different ways of tackling that problem or issue.  I have quoted one of my favourite poets many times here (T.S. Eliot) as saying that while he might have treated of the same themes over and over again in his poems that he assuredly always said what he had to say in a different way.  In short, a different angle or a different perspective on the same old problem is always enlightening and always enriching.

A little Wisdom from the Fourth and Fifth Centuries

St Augustine of Hippo by Antonio Rodriguez

St. Augustine of Hippo 354 – 430, who straddled these two centuries, was a most erudite philosopher and theologian and one of the greatest scholars of his era.  He had a lot to say on the mystery of pain and suffering.  He wrote much on the topic of evil in the world, and his logical and insightful mind left us with some interesting insights. One which I like is that good is at all times logically prior to evil.  For example, when a piece of fruit, say an apple or an orange, rots, the putrefaction or the rottenness occurs in and inheres in the logically prior goodness of the fruit.  The goodness of the fruit or vegetable is there first. Likewise, take for example that you break your leg playing football or some other sport, the brokenness of the bone only occurs in the logically prior good bone.  St Augustine put this beautifully and succinctly in his eloquent Latin thus: "Malum est privatio boni" which translates as "Evil is the privation of the good."  For a fourth century thinker, who had just converted to the Christian Church, this argument allowed him to posit the utter goodness of God while a previous religion to which he had belonged, the Manichean sect, had always asserted that the godhead contained both good and evil principles.  Evil vitiates the good and all evil is either brought about by the Devil or by the evil actions of human beings who have been given their free will to act in any manner they wish by a loving God. For Augustine, such a loving God will not force human beings to act correctly under any circumstances as He values human free will so much.   In all of this, remember we are dealing with fourth and fifth century thought.

In another attempt to square the existence of evil with a good God, St Augustine also alluded to the Principle of Plenitude which he had learnt from Plato.  In a nutshell this principle states that the universe by its nature must contain all possible forms of existence, and this by definition means that it must also contain evil. For an article on this theory see HERE.

Western Philosophy and its Flaws

The wind and sea has battered this tree: Calabria, January 2014

One can see here immediately the emergence of one of the main flaws of Western Philosophy, namely a preoccupation with the cognitive and cerebral nature of thinking, and this flawed perspective would reign right down to our own time, viz., the supremacy of reason or rationality or the cognitive - to express the issue in as many ways as possible. There is no great weight given to the native psychology or inner feelings of the human person.  The strength of Western Philosophy, namely its pursuit of cognitive thinking and rational thought, is also its striking weakness if it is not balanced more by the affective considerations  drawn from a more holistic perspective as to what the human being is or may be in its fullness.  Western philosophy and theology built upon the foundations laid by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and they interwove Greek philosophy with Christian thought to a considerable extent.  However, as regards the question of evil, the contribution of the very early Christian thinker St Irenaeus can so easily be overlooked as the greats like St Augustine and St Thomas held so much sway for so many centuries.  Irenaeus showed a more lateral thinking process and allowed for development of the human person in a more holistic sense to use this term rather anachronistically.

The Thought of St Irenaeus, 130-202 A.D. : Wisdom from the Second century

The astute St Irenaeus of Lyons

I don't like introducing technical terms into what I describe here as a journal of a soul, but I feel for the sake of completion I will have to do so.  That term is Theodicy, and it basically means the attempt to answer the question of why a good God (Theos) permits the existence (or justice or Dike: hence Theodicy) of evil. Theodicy attempts to resolve the problem of evil by reconciling the traditional divine characteristics of  omniscience, benevolence and omnipotence with the occurrence of evil and suffering in the physical and human worlds.  Without getting into any complexities, this theodicy argued that human beings are born into a world in which they have to grow and develop.  The argument goes that we humans would never grow and develop unless there were problems (including pain and suffering) that would cause and help us to grow.  This second-century philosopher and theologian Irenaeus, after whom the theodicy is named, proposed a two-stage creation process in which humans require free will and the experience of evil to develop. Another early Christian theologian, Origen, presented a response to the problem of evil which cast the world as a schoolroom or hospital for the soul. It is interesting to note that the great Romantic poet John Keats saw the world as the "vale of soul-making" and his thoughts were very much in line with those of St Origen and St Irenaeus.*

Balances

Once again, as I have said in my opening paragraph, there is precious little insight that any of us can offer to this profound theme, but rehearsing the answers proposed by scholars and spiritual souls over the centuries of our civilization is a sine qua non for any thought on the subject.  T.S. Eliot, whom I am wont to quote and whom I quoted in my opening paragraph stated that he could not be a good poet, or even a poet at all, unless he could place himself within a tradition of poets writing over the long number of years our civilization has lasted.  Likewise, with any other study we care to embark upon.  

The most important lesson that I have learnt from my studies and from my reading over the years is that of the balance of opposites.  How would we know the good unless we knew its opposite, namely evil?  How would we know the light unless we experienced the dark? How would we know joy unless we knew sorrow? How would we know exultation unless we knew humility? How would we know happiness unless we knew its opposite? How would we know love unless we knew its absence?  How would we know hope unless we understood despair. These are all polar opposites that seem to exist in a healthy if strange tension.  The Romantics, especially Coleridge, spoke much about this phenomenon as the tension of opposites. Yeats called such a tension of opposites by the name "antinomies."  The Eastern Religions/Spiritualities often get around understanding, or at least accepting and appreciating, this balance of opposites a little better than the Western mind.  However, for an Eastern take on the mystery presented by the problems of pain and suffering we must wait for a later post and yet again some deeper reflection. Until then, dear reader, Peace, Shalom, Namaste, and may we be given the strength and courage to bear whatever pain and suffering is our lot!

End Note

* "(T)heologian Mark Scott has argued that Origen, rather than Irenaeus, ought to be considered the father of this kind of theodicy. In 1710, Gottfried Leibniz proposed that the world is the best of all possible worlds because it balances all the possible goods the world could contain. Friedrich Schleiermacher argued in the nineteenth century that God must necessarily create flawlessly, so this world must be the best possible world because it allows God's purposes to be naturally fulfilled. In 1966, philosopher John Hick discussed the similarities of the preceding theodicies, calling them all "Irenaean". He supported the view that creation is incomplete and argued that the world is best placed for the full moral development of humans, as it presents genuine moral choices. British philosopher Richard Swinburne proposed that, to make a free moral choice, humans must have experience of the consequences of their own actions and that natural evil must exist to provide such choices." (See WIKI for a more detailed account of this interesting Theodicy).

Journal of a Soul 55

Embracing the Magic of Hope

When I use the word "magic" here, I am in no way using it in its restricted, perhaps more correct, understanding of actions connected with manipulating normal things or forces by paranormal methods.  I am, of course, using it in its broadest sense to suggest everything that evokes wonder, beauty, mystery and love in the human soul.  In a world where destruction is more often than not the hallmark of human interaction, we need the magic of hope more than ever.  One would want to be a strong individual not to grow depressed when one even cursorily views the history of humankind where wars and crimes against humanity so obviously abound.  One would want to be equally courageous in viewing the international news which is virtually filled with accounts of the destruction of humans by other humans: from Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Central African Republic and South Sudan where there are 1000+ deaths per country per year (See Here and Here)  to the destruction of our very own worldly home, namely Mother Earth, our lovely Blue Planet.

Ring-tailed lemur, Dublin Zoo, May 2014

The longer I live the more passionate I am becoming about the need to inspire hope in others.  There are too few great leaders who are doing so today in the political world.  The two most outstanding leaders to my mind, in a more spiritual context, who are attempting to cast the magical spell of hope over a very destructive, greedy and hateful world are such wonderful leaders as Pope Francis I and the Dalai Lama.  Other leaders who impress me from the political world are Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, Desmond Tutu of South Africa and Kofi Annan.  For the life of me, I cannot think of very many more.  President Clinton still impresses me with his commitment to world peace and peace in Northern Ireland, as does the wonderful President Jimmy Carter who is constantly working for peace all around the globe. These are all leaders who inspire hope. Another group of committed "retired" leaders that much encourages the present writer are The Elders and you can read all about their wonderful work for peace here. 

As a teacher, I find that often many of our youngsters are lacking in hope.  In the wake of the downfall of the infamous Celtic Tiger, a growing number of people are mired in negativity that can all to often descend into the lower reaches of desolation and despair. Many pupils who attend our inner city working class school cannot see very much in the way of promise for their future lives. In Ireland as I write, there have been so many cutbacks, so much austerity that the presence of the Labour Party - who are partners in a Coalition Government with a centre-right party called Fine Gael - has been virtually wiped out on town councils all around Ireland.  The Labour Party has been adjudged by the electorate to have so much compromised, or indeed sold out on, their socialist principles that the voters virtually ignored voting for any of their candidates.  A very disillusioned and dejected voting public opted instead for independents and candidates from other parties, most especially Sinn Féin.

"Pp...pp. pick up a penguin," at Dublin Zoo, May 2014

One boy who comes to me for counselling suffers from a sort of low-grade depression for which he is taking sessions from a qualified psychologist in a local hospital.  I work with him once a week.  He is representative of a growing number of young people who seem to be somewhat bereft of hope.  In our sessions, we constantly talk about choosing life and hope, not despair and death.  Recently a young female contact (I never like the use of the word "friends" for "contacts" on this social network as it is a definite misnomer that can cause some young people an amount of anguish if they are deleted or blocked or even bullied by another so called "friend.") on Facebook put up a rather depressing status including the symbol of the skull: "It's mad knowing the only thing we actually are promised in life, is death I do have meself (sic) freaked to bits thinking about it!" Indeed, I notice that FB has become a sort of diary for many of our young people where they reveal their hearts to an oftentimes disinterested public.  As I say, I have my doubts about how helpful FB can be in mental health matters, but that is a debate for another post.

Attracted to the Light

It is indeed a truism to say that we are attracted to the light and repulsed by the dark. For the most part, we are all intuitively attracted by the light in good people.  Generally, it has been my experience that really good people are innately attractive, e.g., Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Pope John XXIII, Pope John-Paul II and in more recent times Pope Francis I.  I have named many others above in my opening paragraph.  I leave it to you, all you good loyal readers out there, to name your own attractive world political and spiritual leaders.  Essentially, such leaders share much with the historical Jesus and the equally historical Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), St Francis and all the present day great spiritual leaders (as distinct from Religious Leaders.  I will be contentious here by stating that I believe that Pope Benedict XVI was a Religious Leader while Pope Francis is a Spiritual Leader). I believe that the great contemporary religious writer and theologian Karen Armstrong is also an attractive spiritual leader.  Her books are widely read and she has been universally honoured for them.*

We must radiate the light of hope in our lives, especially if we are in any position of leadership.  Leadership requires those who exercise it to be real, authentic human beings, aware both of their strengths and weaknesses, to be open to encouraging those whom it is both their task and privilege of leading, being so self-assured in themselves that no one on the staff is ever a threat to their sense of authority.  They must be motivators who notice and affirm the innate talents in each and everyone of their colleagues and employees.  This may be a tall order, but after all that is why we put such people into leadership roles and pay them oftentimes extravagant salaries.

If we know that in the end, in a very real and actual way, every individual life is a physical

Chimp with orange, Dublin Zoo, May 2014

failure in the sense that we all end up in the grave, why then should we keep going on?  If, in the end, all the knowledge we have learnt in our individual brains decays into nothing with our bodies, why do we desire to learn?  A very intelligent student asked me that the other day when we attended the presentation of Green Flags for schools that had made serious efforts to cut down on waste of energy and water. We were discussing the dreadful ecological state we have got our lovely Blue Planet into in these more modern times when he asked the question.  If in the end we are all going to perish, given the horrific mess we have made of our planet, why not give up? I replied that one reason we bothered is that we did not ever wish to become victims, that we had a desire, in-built in us, for order and meaning, and that to give up hope was to admit defeat. As we continued our discussion we spoke of humankind being co-creators with the Creator of the Universe, of our being called to build up as many lovely things as we could for the sake of others, for the sake of all humankind and for the sake of all creaturely and inanimate life.

The lovely cuddly red panda at Dublin Zoo, May 2014

When we write a poem, sing a song, compose a new piece of music, protect animals, build a new building, nurse another sick human being or animal, discover a new piece of knowledge to add to the jigsaw of wonder which this life essentially is, we are lighting candles of hope. When we put out our hand to help another, when we join a cause for the betterment of someone or something or even smile in acceptance of another, we are engaged in spreading the light of hope.  When we shake hands, when we hug another, when we truly listen in acceptance, when we are truly compassionate towards all sentient things, as the Dalai Lama is wont to put it, then and only then are we a true and authentic people of hope.  All our most profound religious and spiritual traditions speak of the light of hope conquering the darkness of despair.  It is no wonder that we often turn to their wisdom traditions in times of disillusionment and despair for words of comfort like: "better to light one candle than to scorn the dark," or "every journey, no matter how long, begins with one little step."  Even if you only smiled at someone today, you are engaged in the apostleship of hope.  I have long loved the short saying of the late Medieval Catholic mystic Meister Eckhart that runs: “If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.”  If each and everyone of us said this prayer as often as we can on a daily basis we would be truly embracing the magic of hope. 


Footnote:

* In May 2008 Armstrong was awarded the Freedom of Worship Award by the Roosevelt Institute, one of four medals presented each year to men and women whose achievements have demonstrated a commitment to the Four Freedoms proclaimed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 as essential to democracy: freedom of speech and of worship, freedom from want and from fear. The institute stated that Armstrong had become "a significant voice, seeking mutual understanding in times of turbulence, confrontation and violence among religious groups." It cited "her personal dedication to the ideal that peace can be found in religious understanding, for her teachings on compassion, and her appreciation for the positive sources of spirituality." 

Journal of a Soul 20

Searchers for, or Makers of  Meaning?

It is wonderful to write one's thoughts, give them shape and pattern on a page, and even see them take a virtual form that can be summoned up at the touch of a button or as a random connection to some remotely connected search on Google, initiated by an unknown soul.  Then that those thoughts might be read, that they might even elicit a response only adds to the wonderment.  There are times when I wonder do my thoughts precede my words or do my words precede me thoughts - the hen-egg conundrum in another guise.  And yet, I believe instinctively that it is the interplay of both, that dynamism, or symbiosis even, where one supports the other that is more important.  

As I write these thoughts, I also fully realise that these thoughts write me, that they are, in fact, giving shape to "me", forming my selfhood.  We find our selves (and I deliberately disjoin this word) in doing, in action and in all things that we pursue to give our little lives meaning.  As I have said in these posts so many times before, we are meaning-making creatures, and the greatest meaning we can make is our very own SELF.  Again, we shape our selves in another important way to - by simply learning to be and become the person we were innately meant to be.  In that sense we make ourselves by metaphorically travelling in two directions as it were, by going without (going out and interacting with others and the world) and by going within (through meditation and contemplation, through entering the stillness of not alone one's own being, but discovering in that stillness the unity of all being of which the self is put a drop in the ocean.).

And yet, I don't want to make too much of "making meaning" here.  I wish, rather to comment on the human condition insofar as it relentlessly searches for meaning.  In a sense, this is almost a counter spiritual movement if it is a fraught and lonely search that reveals very little meaning, maybe even frustration and despair.  In this sense, I am writing here about the very heart of existentialism - that lonely search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world.  Searching for meaning can be both a spiritual and a disillusioned aspiritual (I'm not sure if this word exists, but unspiritual is certainly not what I mean, what I mean is a-spiritual in the way amoral relates to moral!) quest at one and the same time.  Let us not dwell too much on the sheer meaninglessness of life as Camus would have it in his version of the great myth of Sisyphus. 

Ah, dear reader, you are probably wondering where these thoughts are going to at all, at all.  In these posts, I often believe I am feeling my way in the dark, but hopefully with a little more direction than Mulla Nasruddin searching for his lost key under the light of the street lamp simply because there was more light there than in the dark house where he had lost it.  And so let me come to some point in this meandering post.  Last Thursday evening I had the pleasure to view the wonderful film The Great Gatsby.  Indeed, it was to my mind wonderfully loyal to the book, or at least to my memory of it from years ago - having read it for my Leaving Certificate many years ago when I was a young lad of 17 years. What comes across in the film is the sheer feeling of lostness, of being cut adrift on an ocean of multiple, though colourful and alluring experiences; of searching for something of value, almost irretrievably lost in that multiplicity; of tasting excess after excess and finding it all so hollow.  What is it, at all, that can make us humans really happy?  Why do things, which we once desired so much, eventually leave such a rotten taste in the mouth?  

In a sense, this book or film is quintessentially about F. Scott Fitzgerald himself.  After all, all writing is inevitably autobiographical  when pondered and reflected upon and cut back to the bone.  One quotation I placed on the flyleaf of a recent piece of work was a quotation from this wonderful Irish American writer.  That quotation runs:  “Five years have rolled away from me and I can’t decide exactly who I am, if anyone.  (Letter, 1932).  He had written The Great Gatsby in 1925 at the young age of 29, when he was obviously a searcher for meaning in a fraught and intense way.  One can see this search for meaning (let's call it meaning as revealed in love, in human love - yet very much in this case in the form of the classical love for the unobtainable beloved) in the following quotation about Gatsby which we find in the first chapter:

―He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock.

           (Scribner's paperback edition, p. 21)

That green light in the darkness marked where his beloved Daisy Buchanan lived with her millionaire husband Tom.  And, indeed, we instinctively know that this love is pretty much unobtainable, and the fog that is not quite as thick as that in Eugene O'Neill's wonderful play Long's Day's Journey into Night, is all too indicative of lostness: "―If it wasn‘t for the mist we could see your home across the bay…You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." (Ibid., p.92)

And then, there is that very sad expression, which is the very antithesis of all spirituality, that suggests that the only way of steering our barque of self through the choppy waters of life is by living in the past or by the vain attempt to recapture that past in the now..  The quotation I have in mind is given almost verbatim in the movie:

"Can‘t repeat the past?‘ he cried incredulously. Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand...  I‘m going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She‘ll see."

―He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.  (Ibid., p.110)

In this sense, then, as I have already stated, this could be said to be an aspiritual quest, an illusive and elusive quest.  Those of us who deeply accept the spiritual life believe fervently in living in the now.  Indeed, we could say that Gatsby was living in a spiritual or existential hell, well before Albert Camus gave it philosophical form.

One theme of this novel  or film could be stated as follows: Dwelling in the past can only result in obsession and misfortune. We cannot transplant ourselves into the past again as it is passed and gone forever. The future misfortune can only be prevented by learning from the past.  Gatsby simply had not learned this lesson.  Another theme would be: Some of us drink in and swallow whole the illusion that the rich person's life is perfect.  In other words, we confuse illusion with reality.  After all, is this not one of the main symptoms of mental illness - that the border lines between illusion and reality are very blurred indeed? Another theme, still, would be that when dreams become an obsession they fall out of our reach.  Finally, another theme would be that wealth is not all it's cracked up to be; that the American dream may be linked to wealth, but that it is much, much more, too.

In writing this novel of quest for meaning, F. Scott Fitzgerald penned a classic which has made his name immortal in human culture as he pointed out the sham which life can be.  Deep down as humans we know we want more.  The tragedy may be that this wonderfully gifted writer F. Scott Fitzgerald may not have truly realised how great a writer he was and that his finely crafted words would live on after he had passed into the mist or fog of the past as a person.

Reading the book and viewing the film can only affect us deeply if we are at all human.  Both will push us to want to live in the now with an eye to our future. We can never, for an instant really believe the words of the narrator as we finish the novel or film, because we know, that like Gatsby we, too, will be lost forever in the fog of our own illusion if we do:

―I thought of Gatsby‘s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy‘s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could barely fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night....

―Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that‘s no matter – to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning...

―So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.(180, 182)