Patience and Sympathy

     Czech playwright turned dissident (turned, some years later, president) Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011):

     "People who are used to seeing society only “from above” tend to be impatient. They want to see immediate results. Anything that does not produce immediate results seems foolish. They don’t have a lot of sympathy for acts which can only be evaluated years after they take place, which are motivated by moral factors, and which therefore run the risk of never accomplishing anything."

     The act of writing a blog is one of those acts which can only be evaluated years after the fact to determine whether it has accomplished anything. To date, I'd say it has caused more than a few people to ponder times long gone. Maybe not with the same intensity which F. Scott Fitzgerald uses to describe Nick as he contemplates the historic geography of Long Island. There are few among us who can summon up the profundity of Fitzgerald. More to the point is that little about the time which I summarize in this blog compares with that "enchanted moment when men held their breath in the presence of this continent."

     Nothing we encountered was as raw or unrefined as what those Dutch sailors must have seen. In contrast, our world functioned with a well known and distinct set of characteristics which we knew unconsciously how deal with.

     As you might recall, The Great Gatsby concludes with a sad Nick contemplating the historic geography of Long Island:

     "Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

     And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, 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 then, but that's no matter—tomorrow 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." (9.151-154)