Sometimes, we lose sight of the stars. Stars—those ancient
flickers that appear and fade like lightning bugs. We are so caught up in the
tall shiny buildings that we forget there are solar bodies flickering past the
late night offices and 23rd floor janitors.
We went to see The
Great Gatsby. I knew I would be heartbroken. I didn’t realize it wouldn’t
be for the same anticipated why.
Living in the city has forged new perspectives in me. I now
walk down the street and see beauty in each person. I wonder if they think they
are beautiful (some of them know it). I wonder if they think I am beautiful (I
will never know).
“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and
beautiful?”
Some cultures find staring to be impolite. We Americans, for
example, are used to hearing our mother chide, “Don’t stare,” or feeling
ashamed when the person at whom we are staring catches us eye-to-eye. I’m told
this is not so in China—that you can stare all you want and no one would think
the less. Sometimes I try to justify my want to stare with the thought that
it’s all about the intention of the stare—there is staring just to get a better
look, staring for the purpose of storing up gossip, and staring because
something appears slightly unbelievable. Not that any of the intent behind any
stare could really matter, since the person on the other side of the eyes
cannot know your intent.
Walking along the sidewalk today, I noticed a man walk along
a perpendicular sidewalk. Our paths were about to cross like comets. I gave a
brief glance up. Neither of us made eye contact. We simultaneously slowed to
avoid hitting that turning point at the same time. He was turning left; I was
going straight. We managed to time our steps such that we didn’t come within
one foot of each other. Sometimes we try so hard to keep to ourselves.
“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and
beautiful?”
I have a friend that is ten years older than me. We’ve known
each other for a long while now; he’s seen me grow out of awkward teenage
years, and I’ve seen him morph into a thirty-something adult. Sometimes he acts
much older than he is; we both joke about it. One night, he called me “kiddo,”
and it suddenly hit me that I am still just a little girl to him. He is the
only one getting older.
Not long ago, I noticed bags under my eyes for the first
time. I had a long work week—too many hours in front of computer screen and not
enough hours with my eyes closed for rest. I’m
too young for this.
In my attempts to train for a half-marathon, I overworked my
knee, causing sporadic pain and swelling and inability to run until further
notice. “You’re too young to be having those problems,” my mother told me over
the phone.
Contrary to popular belief, most wines don’t age well.
“I just remembered, today is my birthday,” Nick Carraway
says. Thirty years old—“the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list
of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there
was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry
well-forgotten dreams from age to age…So we drove on toward death through the
cooling twilight.”
We are always so aware of the death in others, but surely it
must be the only topic on which we think least of ourselves. We are so
concerned about losing others, that we forget that we ourselves will be lost
too.
An excerpt from Annie Dillard:
Are we ready to think of all
humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard
a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a
flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate
of individuals, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mold, as one creature—but
us? When we people differ, and know our consciousness, and love? Even lovers,
even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. And we like it this way,
at least in the West: we prefer to endure any agony of isolation rather than to
merge and extinguish our selves in an abstract “humanity” whose fate we should
hold dearer than our own. Who could say, I’m in agony because my child died,
but that’s all right: Mankind as whole has abundant children? The religious
idea sooner or later challenges the notion of the individual. The Buddha taught
each disciple to vanquish his fancy that he possessed an individual self.
Huston Smith suggests that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s: The seas
evaporate water, clouds build and loose water in snowflakes, which dissolve and
go to sea. The simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique
and novel hexagons and spikes? Is my very mind a wave in the ocean, a wave the
wind flattens, a flaw the wind draws like a finger?
We know we must yield, if only intellectually.
Okay, we’re a lousy snowflake. Okay, we’re a tree. These dead loved ones we
mourn were only those brown lower branches a tree shades and kills as it grows;
the tree itself is thriving. But what kind of tree are we growing here, that
could be worth such waste and pain? For each of us loses all we love, everyone
we love. We grieve and leave. What marvels shall these future whizzes, damn
their eyes, accomplish?
“Will you still love me when I’m no
longer young and beautiful?”
This week, an image was released of
planet Earth from a spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn. God, will you still
love us, this shining speck of dust, though we’re no longer young, though we’ve
ruined this sphere from a lush snowflake on the tongue to a pinch of salt in
the eye?
“Gatsby believed in the green light,
the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then,
but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms out
farther…And one fine morning—“
Tonight, the full moon reflected off
tall, empty windows. Standing on the bridge, all at once, the rush of a train
below hit me in a gust, so suddenly that I for a moment thought the train was
upon me, that I was hit, and my mind had not yet caught up. Now when I think of
trains, I only think of Anna Karenina.
“Will you still love me when I’m no
longer young and beautiful?”
Have you ever noticed how our eyes
wander when we talk on the phone? What are you looking at as you tell you
mother “good night” or you laugh with an old friend, unseen? Sitting on the
bus, a young woman across from me gazes all around. Her head bobs like a
floating gull, her eyes focus out at the un-seeable horizon point the gull is
ever watching.
My friend is not the only one
getting older. I asked him to please, please see me as equal, as adult. See me
as my own person, not a college-buddy’s cousin. See me as a grown woman.
Individual. At least another branch on the tree.
He once told me, “You know, you
really are beautiful. I don’t think you’re told that enough.” I can’t stop
wondering what he saw just then. Am I just like all of the other people on the
city streets?
“Will you still love me when I’m no
longer young and beautiful?”
Nick- You can’t repeat the past.
Gatsby- Can’t repeat the past? Why,
of course you can!
I’ve learned that moving to a new
place is a lot like being in the same place you’ve always been only taking your
photo album and shaking it so that all of the photos fall out, and somehow, as
they fall back into place, the faces look slightly different—they have
different names, their voice is a little lower or higher. The people walking
down the streets are the same ones in Mamont, Waynesburg, Florence, Seattle. You
can’t repeat the past, but that doesn’t mean a new day will be all that
different.
The way that all red wines have that
same thickness but a different tinge of taste on the back of the tongue. The
same warm feeling going down your throat.
Jordan (in Gatsby) says that she loves big parties, “They’re so intimate; at
small parties, there isn’t any privacy.” Is this what it means to be a
snowflake in an ocean? As Nick meditates, “I was within and without.”
Jay Gatsby was 32 years old when he
watched the green light from the end of his dock—that light, that hope. And in
what? In the past? In the Daisy he once knew?
Time and aging are funny things. “We
are the youngest we will ever be again,” they say. Don’t ask me who ‘they’ are.
As a tree grows and bears fruit, as branches fall, as wine stews stale with
age, as our bodies step into year after year, as change is slow and not
noticeable on a day-to-day scale, so it is with God, outside of time. Even if
he were to change, would our souls even see the difference?
“Will you still love me when I’m not
longer young and beautiful?”
Daisy Buchanan, “I hope she’ll be a
fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in the world, a beautiful little
fool.”
