The whitest pouring of eternal light: Great Gatsby & Cannery Row

"He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover
something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.

His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could
once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he
could find out what that thing was"

I saw Gatz recently: a spectacular seven hour theatre experience by NY's Elevator Repair Service, a word by word reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It was truly wonderful. For seven hours I was fully under the spell of wonderful storytelling and wanted for nothing. 



Listening to The Great Gatsby thus in one session it stuck me as "something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned": as Fitzgerald wrote of his aim before embarking on the novel. Profound by virtue of its poetic yet deeply simple observation of the relations of flawed characters.

Fitzgerald captures; the dazzle of materialism, and the inherent dishonesty, and  curious emptiness, this engenders in relationships, the deep intense currents of yearning -  for happiness, for intimacy, for human connection - that effect us, and romance, both sublime and full of self deception:

"One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down
the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where
there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight.
They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees--he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

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 for him like a flower and the
incarnation was complete."

It seems to me that Fitzgerald is beset by ambivalence; he is unable to fully forgive his characters their failings and yet unable not to love them.  In this, I set Fitzgerald in contrast with Steinbeck.

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."

John Steinbeck

I found the clear sighted wisdom which Steinbeck displays in his extraordinary Cannery Row no less than stunning. His authorial voice invokes an unfailing, deep, and truly loving compassion through which he holds, observes and exposes the multifaceted truth of  his characters humanity.
It is, I think, through this compassion, this spiritual certitude,  that Steinbeck transcends (yet includes) an amibivalent observation of humanity's brilliance and weakness. Reading Cannery Row  my heart broke open  at Steinbeck's depiction of deep beauty in the ordinary, the shattering acceptance of love in wrongdoing, and the joy and pain, mystery and wonder, at moments of union in love with the heart of another in this ever passing world.

This difference in the two writers is  shown in their summation. For Fitzgerald it seems we push forward with hope towards the fading lustre of our dreams, against the unrelentling tide of struggle that is human life-

"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."

"Even now
I know that I have savoured the hot taste of life
Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast.
Just for a small and a forgotten time
I have had full in my eyes from off my girl
The whitest pouring of eternal light.
The heavy knife. As to a gala day."
(from the sanscrit poem Black Marigolds),