Given the variety of ways available to us for marking off significant periods in our lives, perhaps the surprising thing is that we're so little, rather than so much, aware of them. Some of these are largely shared - the passage of days, weeks, months, years, decades (to name the most obviously prescribed and linear ones), and then there are seasons, of course - while others are more individual but nonetheless widely recognised (birthdays being the obvious example). But I reckon that the really interesting ones are more idiosyncratic - organising one's life history in terms of relationships, say, or friendships, or the music of the time, or key books read, and so on. And naturally all of these can and do coexist.
One such for me, perhaps not as significant as some but still looming reasonably large, is the Review's Annual Dinner. This isn't the place to excavate everything associated with that event, but I'm remembering one conversation I had at last year's, with Ros C, the Dean's wife, about literature and life and the rest of the usual, and in particular her saying that she thought that The Great Gatsby was a book which was particularly prone to reading differently each time one returned to it at a different stage in their lives. I think that I'd read it fairly recently at that stage, but what she said immediately made sense to me and it's stayed with me.
As it turns out, I've re-read the book sooner than I'd expected, inspired by the making of that list of favourites, and while no single interval of a little over 12 months - during which my external life has slowed to almost a complete lull - is likely to effect a dramatic change in my perspective on things (literature and life &c), this past year has, I suspect, seen more change than most.
Returning to Gatsby, though, I've been struck anew by how it glitters - how every page is scattered with cynical bon mots and wry witticisms - and (the other side of the coin) by how it shimmers with sadness lying just beneath the bright, shiny surface. I was also (ahem) reflecting, as I read it, on how nice it was to be reading prose which wasn't afraid to reach for the lyrical - and, moreover, which succeeds in that aim - and generally loving the 'literariness' of it all, the facility of the writing and the way that images and themes emerge and work themselves through.
...how it glitters. A lot of the appeal for me lies in the marrying of the glib, mannered, cynical cleverness of its protagonists with their rich inner lives; how fragile and beautiful and doomed they are. Only it isn't really beauty so much as attractiveness, and of that kind that could never endure (moths drawn to the flame of their time). I would have liked to live in that time, I think, romanticised though it may be in the writing of Fitzgerald et al.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
