The Light Undimmed
On the Dangers of Obsession, Unchecked Idealism, and Incorruptible Dreams
Recently, I rewatched Baz Luhrmann's take on The Great Gatsby. I also went through the novel once again not long ago. It's clear why many consider the book to be an American literary classic. Its rough but vibrant pieces add up to something far greater than the sum of its parts.
I'm not here for a book or film review, though. I want to explore a few ideas that F. Scott Fitzgerald shakes to the surface with Gatsby, namely obsession, unchecked idealism, and the unwavering power, both for good and ill, of an incorruptible dream.
Without completely spoiling either for anyone who hasn't watched the film or read the novel, Jay Gatsby is an incredibly wealthy but enigmatic 1920's New York man living in a castle of a mansion directly across the bay from Daisy Buchanan, the ultimate "one that got away." To save the mystery for many of you, I'll just say that several life events and individual choices conspire to keep them apart and he spends his days in perpetual longing, having built his vast wealth only to reclaim Daisy's affections, to at last be worthy of her, so he thinks.
There is a fine line between hope and self-delusion running through the spine of this story. Gatsby's unwavering belief that he can turn back time and reclaim his lost years with Daisy is moving, something many of us could learn a little from. Not for its naivete, but for its ability to create change and inspire action in our lives. Unfortunately, it is also his undoing, causing Gatsby to make self-destructive choices to gain the favor of people who, largely, aren't worth spending time with. While life affords each of us a handful of shots at redemption and reconciliation, these are rare, and they are never quite what we think they will be.
We can try again sometimes to mend, to rebuild, to reconnect the severed threads of relationships or dreams, and occasionally, miraculously, it works. But we can never erase and redo. The book of life moves in one direction only. To pretend that we can ignore months or years of changes and reclaim everything lost is a personal fiction of the highest order. When we're given those opportunities to rebuild, it's important we understand that this process is not the erasure of the choices and trials that led us to this place, but something that will only be successful by dealing with the subsequent events with our eyes open, so that we don't repeat the same mistakes on this new go round.
Jay Gatsby's hope, while inspiring, borders on the adolescent. Worse, it blinds him. And hope, something that requires us to see into the unknown and believe for better things, at its best, is never blind. It sees the potential for better days but doesn't ignore the lessons learned so painfully and at so great a cost to each of us. To Jay Gatsby, both his hope and his dream were incorruptible. The question here is, "Is that really a good thing?"
Should our dreams be so exalted, so idealized, that we don't allow them an inch of movement, or the ability to be reconsidered, reformed, or rewritten? I'd like to think each of us understands that nothing in life, even our highest and most sacred dreams, thrives inside a glass case. In a recent essay, I discussed our frequent desire to turn parts of our real life into a kind of still life, or protected artifacts, into display pieces that can neither be touched nor changed.
The problem with ideals like this, while they remain a testament to beauty and personal celebration, even something quietly transcendent in its stasis, has little connection to the realities of life and relationships. No matter how good, how righteous, how seemingly perfect the image, it is a piece of life mummified, and often so delicate in its preservation, that when we finally open the jar to take hold of our relic, it turns to dust in our hands.
Ideas of unchangeable perfection cannot stand up to the forces of real life. They have the frame but not the substance needed for existence. Our ability to adapt when necessary is paramount to the longevity and usefulness of our dreams. Our willingness to reorient our vision based on newly acquired information, and hopefully, no small amount of wisdom, will ultimately determine whether our dream ends up opening or closing doors for us.
Obsession is easy to come by in this life. From childhood we learn to obsess over the smallest of things (of course they don't feel small at the time). It might be that one toy we believe will make us perfectly happy forever, that person we believe will always be there, the situation we just know will never change. Later, we learn to obsess over jobs, houses, cars, trips, and definitely, lovers. And strangely but predictably, when they don't fulfill all our needs, instead of internalizing this message and putting expectations into a more reasonable psychology, we just go looking for something else to fill up all the gaps and canyons in our heart and mind, a wish no single thing or person can ever fulfill.
A little obsession in life can be fun. And it's part of our journey as humans to occasionally put certain ideas or certain people on pedestals. You could even say that falling in love is a kind of inspired and benevolent obsession. But these obsessions leave the realm of inspiration or harmless amusement when they begin to shift both the way we see ourselves and the way we see the world for the worse. A little obsession can butter our bread. A lot of it will rot the very food we had hoped would sustain us.
Unchecked obsession can destroy any of us, especially when we aim it toward things that aren't coming to fruition, other things that probably shouldn't come to pass, and for people who don't return our level of affection. We risk living inside our head, inside the image we've created of the perfect relationship, the perfect job, the perfect life. And while beauty is abundant, more so than we usually recognize, perfection doesn't exist in this world.
One primary aspect of obsessive thinking is idealism to the point of delusion. I'm largely an idealist and a romantic, albeit a realistic and grounded one, but an idealist and romantic nonetheless. It's easy for me to see the world as it could be, if certain wrongs were made right, certain processes refined, or choices altered. It helps me see the good in others even when they can't. It allows me to push or inspire others to make positive choices even when they don't completely see or believe in the benefit themselves because they're stuck looking at everything negative about the situation. But I've learned over the years, through much consideration and no small amount of disappointment, that ideals can sometimes become devils.
It's not only important but necessary that we carry certain ideals. You can't hold any kind of moral, ethical, or philosophical outlook on life without them. A worldview is essentially a combination of how the world is and how we believe it could or should be.
When it comes to certain aspects of life, like relationships, Some of us could stand a better ideal. Casting a wide net for a season can be a lot of fun. It allows us to meet and get to know different kinds of people, to shape and color our experience and understanding. And it helps us discover or refine those things that we do value above others. Yet, over time, we should be forming a better idea of what we want, what we value in someone we hope to spend our lives with.
Knowing what you value and going after it is a powerful way to operate in the world. But even in this, we need to understand that people and things will continue to change, to grow and diminish, expand here and contract a little there, and holding them up to unreachable standards can ruin everything we've worked hard to build. It also sets them up for burnout when they can't live up to our vision of them. Much of the joy in love comes from the unexpected, and from continually uncovering new layers within one another, even if some of these disrupt previous assumptions.
Gatsby was so obsessed with Daisy that he never allowed himself to see her in the light of day, in the context of common, everyday existence and the myriad complexities of the same. He couldn't see her unadorned, unshackled from the very real dream state they'd briefly shared together a half decade earlier. To him, the idea of life with her was an ethereal and ecstatic cocoon, untouchable, without corruption, and unbreakable.
Unfortunately, for Gatsby, his version of reality inside a bell jar had already been corrupted, already been accessed and changed, already been broken. Daisy, even though she still loved him, had already married and disappeared into vain concerns, perpetual leisure, and carelessness. His efforts to become wealthy and influential, while affording him a more comfortable existence, did not achieve for him the fabled ideal of love and romance he'd once come to believe would always be accessible to the two of them.
He never saw her objectively, never saw that the intensity of his love for her was wildly disproportionate to her quality. I'm not ragging on the ladies here. She's a compelling character and Jay is guilty of many ills himself. I'm only saying that Fitzgerald makes it pretty clear that Daisy, while interesting here and there, is mostly concerned with herself.
With ideals like this, we disallow outside perspectives, anything that might sully the image or crack the glass case surrounding it. This goes not only for the perspectives of others but for the ones our own mind attempts to feed us. An ideal so severe in its self-protection suppresses opposing thoughts and feelings, anything that might put it at risk of exposure and of accountability to the houses of common sense, reason, and wisdom.
Gatsby idealized not merely his vision of love and life, but he had turned Daisy from a beautiful but flawed human being into a kind of divine image. She was for him, the penultimate example of feminine perfection, the only one he could ever truly love or give himself to. I understand this. There is a small measure of this idea that affects each of us at one point or another. Most of us have certain people who've had such an impact on us, individuals so inspiring or influential, that their presence gets seared onto our heart and mind to a degree that can never fully be unmade.
If I'm being honest, of all the women I've loved, there are three that stand above the rest. Even among these, perhaps one stands out even higher. There's no pining, no remnant of hope held out for reconciliation. It's not about that. It has to do with the power each of us carries to affect those around us, especially those we love. The uniqueness of their presence, their viewpoints and intellectual explorations, their superb brand of humor, the vastness and generosity of their hearts, and the wonderfully idiosyncratic way our personalities mingled, awakened a manifestation of life and a realm of shared existence I'd not realized was possible before it washed over me.
Love can do this to us, rewrite some of the rules we thought we were operating by. Some individuals can have such a powerful effect on us that conceiving things any other way can feel like a compromise, like a grayer and paler version of life. Our peek into this heightened plain, especially when it doesn't last that long, can ruin us for anything else. Short but intense experiences are the most dangerous, since anything longer will eventually force us to contend with the rigors and struggles that come standard with long-term relationships. These longer experiences put ecstasy and idealism in perspective and allow us to integrate all of it into our viewpoint.
Thankfully, I'd experienced enough struggle and variance in my time here that I was able to eventually digest and integrate the experiences I had with each of these women into the rest of my life. I came to a place where I could freely recognize the power each encounter held for me and the value of everything learned and shared, while understanding that even though no experience will ever be the same, every future relationship will yield something new, and hopefully, worthy of exploration.
Yet, with a faint nod of solidarity to Gatsby, there remains in me, as it does in all of us, whether it be for a person, a trip, a place, or a season of life, certain unquenchable thirsts, certain untouchable dreams, that while faint and hopefully in service to a realistic view of life, remain, flashing steadily in the night fog, calling out to me like that green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock.
Turning anyone into an unquestionable ideal is perilous. Not the least of which is because it keeps you from seeing the beauty in others. It also sells us on the lie that there is only one way to do life or love, only one way to realize meaning or happiness. It is true that nothing repeats exactly. No experience or relationship will be the same, hold the same import, affect you the same way. Still, by worshiping an ideal, we miss the opportunity not only to learn from our time with this person or this season, but fail to take hold of the possibilities for revelation available to us in our present and future encounters.
Idealism that stores the past in bottles is an understandable but damaging affair. It is also a very difficult mindset to free oneself from. There is a glittering highness to it all, a tragic romance in our fight to hold onto something transcendent yet vanishing. Don't misread me here. There are times in life to fight tooth and nail to save things that are even now perishing.
There are many times to turn your face against the world and war against great powers to protect someone, some relationship, some innocence, to uphold righteous values, or rebuild a lost cause or connection. But this has more to do with staying present in life, more to do with taking action to build a better future, than it does with holding onto our idea of the past.
It's not wrong to recognize, revisit, and honor people and experiences that shaped our lives. It's not wrong to reminisce, to swim occasionally in the seas of nostalgia. It's alright to burn the candle of quiet appreciation now and then for an ecstatic season shared with someone. It's only human and it reminds us we are alive and that these experiences meant as much as we thought they did. It's not wise, though, to remain there, in that bell jar of a life, where obsession rules our decisions, where unreachable ideals govern where we go, what we get involved with, and who we choose to love. And it's no good for us if we spend more time preserving and protecting life than we do living it.