Word Choice

I've been reading The Great Gatsby with my AP Lit students lately, and I'm finding myself laboring to put sentence by sentence, page by page behind me. But it's laboring in a good way. This is my second reading of the book, and as with all good second readings, I'm trying to catch all I can. It's hard work, not because F. Scott Fitzgerald is so bad, but because he's so good.

Every sentence in this book that I don't read twice is a source of guilt. Fitzgerald says so much, with so few words, that I just know I'm missing something, something great, with every half-conscious trail of the eyes. Though it's fewer than 200 pages, it's considered one of the "great American novels." Fitzgerald doesn't need a lot of words to pack a punch; he's so painstakingly careful to pick and choose words with power and emotion that speak more in two syllables than some sentences do in twenty. It's exhausting and thrilling and intimidating all at once.

Take the following passage, for instance:

"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

Or this one:

"His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete."

Sitting in my classroom Friday afternoon, preparing my lesson on Chapters 5 and 6, I felt breathless from attempting to wring out every morsel and truly get what Fitzgerald wanted me to get. It's like he painted an intricate, vibrant landscape, and then he shrunk it down to the size of a postage stamp and said, "Here it is. Take a look. This is life." Every word matters.

From this, two ideas relevant to myself personally and those who aren't studying Gatsby came to mind.

First, we all use language every day. How careful are our selections? In a world where our words have so great a power to friends and enemies, family and strangers, active listeners and casual by-passers, why aren't we as meticulous in our choices? Every conversation, every post, and every tweet say something to the world about us and the truth that we believe. Instead of a postage stamp to study, many of us offer up volumes of text every hour, so much of it a wasted jumble of half-witted, half-hearted, half-serious, and fully powerful nonsense. With so much to say, how would anyone know which of our words we really mean, which ones we want to speak for the true us, which ones point to all that we believe and know and want to share with humanity?

Secondly, if I'm impressed by the care Fitzgerald takes in putting together his masterpiece, how much more awestruck should I be at God's handiwork? Was the Sovereign Source of all that is Good any less careful in constructing the collection of documents that He said is the key to understanding? Can the Bible be maddeningly complex? Absolutely. Confusing? You bet. But it's worth the struggle. Whatever Fitzgerald can tell me about the American psyche, it is a minute fraction of what the God of the universe is begging me to labor through, one masterful sentence at a time.