Tuesdays With Morrie

Reflections on Tuesdays With Morrie—Pages 1-70.

            In moments of extreme emotions, the inward man or woman is revealed.  Who we truly are—in all of its splendor or sorrow—is expelled from the confines of the soul for all to behold.  Some emotions are certainly permissible such as the sudden or hasty frustrations brimming from the boiling moment.  Nevertheless, there are undoubtedly moments of understanding.  Such an instant arose with Morrie, when told he had Lou Gehrig’s disease. 

            “But my old professor had made a profound decision, one he began to construct the day he came out of the doctor’s office with a sword hanging over his head.  Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?  He had asked himself.

            “He would not wither.  Hew ould not be ashamed of dying.

            “Instead he would make death his final project, the center point of his days.  Since everyone was going to die, he could be of great value, right? He could be research.  A human textbook.  Study me in my slow and patient demise.  Watch what happens to me.  Learn with me.

            “Morrie would walk that final bridge between life and death, and narrate the trip” (p. 10). 

           

            Always, in the most sallow darkness, we can find reasons to persist.  We can find reasons to endure. 

            “There are some mornings when I cry and cry and more for myself.  Some mornings, I’m so angry and better.  But it doesn’t last too long.  Then I get up and say, ‘I want to live…’ (p. 21). 

            This exemplary decision can and should be reciprocated in each of our lives.  Rather than moping in the mire of melancholy, if we come to accept our lot and press forward, we shall be endowed with a bestowal of piercing perception.  This perception shall penetrate the woes of the present and allow us to see life for what it truly is.  Then with resolution and resolve we declare to the world: “Your best has not bested me!  Keep your woes, keep your pity, and keep your sour sulking sadness!  I need them not, for I have problems enough of my own!” 

            Although our physical state be filled with pain, why force this anguish upon our mental capacities.  Often the suffering of body comes coupled with the shooting suffering of mind—but according to Morrie, we don’t have to accept it.  We can reject this poisonous plague, which if allowed, will engulf our entire world, enveloping all in grotesque black.

            Undeniably this is all easier on paper than it is in practice.  Without question, circumstance yields to men and women misery too immeasurable to bear.  Yet always there remains a part in which, we are still sovereign.  Our autonomy doesn’t flee at the sight of affliction—the two sit along side each other—autonomy only surrendering because it is easier.  Misery is easy, self-pity is facile, depression is effortless—rather they appear to be.

Announcement of a New Book!

            With the completion of The Great Gatsby, it is necessary that we choose a new title to read for THE FINER THINGS CLUB.  If it is allowed, I should like to choose the next novel, after which, someone else can choose—similar to the process undertaken last summer.  The novel I have chosen is Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom.  My interest in this book was stimulated when my Personal Finance Professor, Craig Israelson, would often begin class by quoting some of its passages.  Of what I heard, I was very impressed by the depth, intensity, and presentation of the subject.  Tuesdays With Morrie is a book about death.  The Boston Globe called the book “An extraordinary contribution to the literature of death.”[1] 

The work covers several timeless themes all seen through the lens of an incapacitated man, dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease.  Knowing that the setting suns are becoming increasingly fewer, Morrie makes the conscious decision to continue living—not allowing death to claim him as its fearful victim—rather as the calm, reasonable person that he is.  This resolve, borne in the forge of one of life’s greatest adversities, is inspiring to experience. 

With the recent passing of my father, of course, anything written on the mysterious subject of death magnetically manipulates my attention.  One passage particularly resonated the chords of understanding.  Death, in our family, came as an unexpected guest.  He glided in, silently stealing away someone we thought belonged to us.  Morrie reports: “Everyone knows they’re going to die,…but nobody believes it.  If we did, we would do things differently.”[2]  This doing things differently speech is particularly penetrating.  I am thrilled to commence this book.

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[1] Albom, Mitch.  Tuesdays With Morrie. New York: Broadway Books, 2002. Print. P. 81.

[2] Ibid. Back Cover.

Final Musings on The Great Gatsby

Final Thoughts on The Great Gatsby

            The Great Gatsby has slid into a sterling spot amongst the classic novels of the ages.  Forever it will be enshrined next to many of the other classics works.  I appreciate the novel because of the descriptive and elevated language that Fitzgerald used to sculpt his masterpiece.  The words rise up off the page and create an illustrative imagery assisting the reader into the fantastic world of Jay Gatsby.  The Great Gatsby exudes elegance, it presents a picture of the nineteen-twenties that a reader can see before him/her.

            That being said, the plot and storyline of The Great Gatsby is deceptive and unpleasant.  I think this is as far as I could ever delve into any sort of romance novel (sorry Twilight fans).   Although I am not in the place or circumstance of any of the main characters, I find myself reeling with frustration by their poor and petty decisions.  I do not presume that my decisions would warrant any different results from a modern audience; however, I should think I would not have pursued Daisy after the finality of her marriage. 

            Above all else, this novel serves as a warning.  It tells us to beware fixating feelings toward one idea or dream.  If we continue in pursuit of something, which is so harmful to us, it will prove our utter ruin.  Undoubtedly, the most depressing part of the novel is the lack of realization of Gatsby.  Often those who are most deviant and deranged in their thinking are completely oblivious to the fact.  What voice of reason can penetrate their loaded ears?  Whose heavy hand will rise to indicate the correct course?  In this novel there is none.  What Gatsby needed was a better friend.  That is easy to say with the facility of hindsight, but Nick Caraway should have expressed some sentiments concerning his obsession with Daisy.

            Recently, I heard a wonderful story, “about a girl that [Jeffrey R. Holland] had tried to reach and could not, that her mother had tried to reach and could not, that her bishop had tried to reach and could not, that her stake president had tried to reach and could not. Nobody could reach her—except her girlfriend, who took her by the collar, shook her, started to cry, and said, ‘Don't you see? Don't you see what you're doing to me? You break my heart!’ She sobbed. She just shook, and she shook her friend. That girl, when nobody (it appeared) on the face of this earth could touch her,... her mother could not reach her; her bishop could not reach her; but a friend reached her and literally grabbed her and shook her and said, ‘You're breaking my heart!’” [1] 

            What Gatsby needed was a friend who would shake him.  Although Caraway said, somewhat hesitantly, “you can’t repeat the past.”  He needed to get his attention, being bold about it.  Although, this also possibly could have not made one lick of difference, Nick Caraway could at least say to himself, I did all that I could.

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[1] (Holland, Jeffrey R. "Remembered and Nourishedby the Good Word of God." speeches.byu.edu. 2012.Web. <http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=867>.)

The Great Gatsby

Chapter 9—The Final Chapter

            This novel is a tragedy—pure and simple.  Two lovers are unable to enjoy perpetuity of their love due to paucity on the part of one.  Daisy is the culprit.  Her character wishes that we believe her to be the victim.  The victim, as far as this novel is concerned, is Nick Caraway.  It is he that must suffer through the alienating relationship.  He that must suffer the disgusting display of doting infatuation laid before a sappy snake who is unable to make up her mind.  Daisy’s tale would affect us were we to see an attempt on her part to preserve this relationship. 

            Nor can we label Gatsby as the victim.  It is his willful rejection of defeat that ultimately contributed to his colossal downfall.  Gatsby is unable to settle.  Were he able, he would have found someone else, who probably would have made him happier than Daisy.  But no, instead, he must invariably have what is not his.  He wants money, which he doesn’t have, so he delves into the devious business of bootlegging.  Upon completing this coveting quest, he finds himself wanting the wife of another man.  This is not love.  For this reason, he falls.  The “Great” Gatsby, ironically lies entombed in his pool, surrounded by his stuff, in his elephantine mansion, completely and bitterly alone.  We find no victim here, no mere butt of some cruel joke, but a deliberate self-destruction in desiring that which is not his.

            Chapter nine is characterized by dnouement—the final resolution of the conflicts and complications, sad as that description may be.  Nick Caraway meets Gatsby’s father, one who has not seen his son for an extended period of time. 

Nick Caraway wants us to sorrow in Gatsby’s death, as he is.  Caraway, therefore, pens the finality of the novel in poetic prose, “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 hardly 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 the, 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. (p. 180—emphasis added). 

The Great Gatsby

Chapter 8

            Chapter eight is rent with sorrow and woe.  It is here that we finally learn of Gatsby’s foundational fondness, as well as Daisy’s superficiality. 

“[Gatsby] had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself—that he was fully able to take care of her.  As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities—he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world” (p. 149).

Gatsby’s progression as a character stops when he is unable to achieve what he seeks.  A present reality, with which we all must cope, is that there are dreams, ambitions, and aspirations that we shall never attain.  The voice of the realist, unflatteringly speaks, his cold breath seeps into our dreams and taints the very hope of that dream.  Then, like a dying tree, the dream slowly stops.  It ceases to be. 

“I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared.  If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.  He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.  A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the anamorphous trees” (p161).

The dealings of this world upon our dreams prove that not all dreams come true.  That is reality.  That is life.  When life puts forth its sallow hand and pulls the vigor from our dreams, what we must do is carry on.  We must push back.  We must push forward.  Occasionally, however, our dreams transfer to realities.  Our life-like blueprint builds before our eyes.  We need rejoice in such moments, for fortune has smiled upon us.  The true tragedy is when our obsession becomes so encompassing, the quest for fantasy-turned realities becomes so engulfing, that we lose sight of any other present possibility.  If our lives are but broken things, dreams crashed on the rocks in the harbor, not even arriving to the ocean of actuality, then our progression halts.

Gatsby’s problems stem from the inability to move on.  Daisy gets married.  Gatsby should have stopped there.  But he doesn’t, he tries to push forward against an unalterable wall.  This wall is the past.  As stated in earlier entries, Gatsby believes that somehow, he is able to penetrate time and reach back into the recesses of yore.  What he should have done is discarded that dream for something new.  He is a talented person, he has a lot going for him; however, his monomania becomes his quick and unexpected downfall.  Gatsby slides into oblivion.  

The Great Gatsby

Chapters 7

            The plot thickens, and the drama heightens as the long-anticipated moment arrives; the confrontation of Daisy and Tom where Daisy will renounce all amours to this supposed and specious lover. Duration of weeks has lent themselves to the manipulation of Daisy, to sway her to believe her attraction and allurement to Tom Buchannan was merely a cozening, aptly performed by a dubious impostor.  So Gatsby has convinced her.  Long has Gatsby waited this majestic moment when he shall be prestigiously crowned the victor and Tom ignominiously decried and derailed for the sycophantic charlatan he undoubtedly is. 

Gatsby has coxed Daisy into a hallucinogenic state.  This brain-washing has proved profitable and has led to this building climactic moment.   The unassuming reader, faulting prior examination of the novel, undoubtedly settles with the notion that Daisy will assuredly announce her love for Gatsby and implore Tom to sign the bill of divorcement.  The remainder of the novel would be the definitive falling action.  No such fortune is found, for when Daisy goes to speak with Tom, she is unable to unclasp the sentiments of love which are painted upon her heart.  Gatsby then plunges in, attempting to force action.

“‘Your wife doesn’t love you,’ said Gatsby. ‘She’s never loved you.  She loves me.’ 

‘You must be crazy!’ exclaimed Tom automatically. 

Gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement. ‘She never loved you, do you hear?’ he cried.  ‘She only married you because I was poor ad she was tired of waiting for me.  It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!’” (p. 130).

If only Gatsby could realize what reasoning he is using.  Doesn’t love, true love draw out requited love from both?  Shouldn’t Daisy accept Gatsby, prince or pauper, rich or poor?  The pettiness of money which pricks Daisy evidences her sheer shallowness.  How can we hope to see a happy-ending for such an unhappy couple? 

  Daisy subsequently reveals her love for Tom as well as Gatsby, which slaps and stings Gatsby.  It taxes him causing embitterment.  Still, he will not give up hope.  With hysteria silently smoldering this lame love-triangle, they take to their cars.  None of the participants of the prior conversation would prove stable to drive.  In an unfortunate event, Daisy, who selected to drive, hit Myrtle Wilson, her life, violently extinguished on that summer night.