Good Brain-Legs and Generous Juniors

As one does, I did a lot of moronic pretending when I was in grad school. I lied about what I knew (because if you pretend to read Heidegger, then you always have to pretend to have read Heidegger), and I lied about what I liked (e.g. whiskey, cats, and Bob Dylan’s Christmas album). When it was easy or self-serving, I sometimes told the truth, including once at a dinner party when I said that my favorite novel was The Great Gatsby.

The host — a lovely intellectual titan who kept a framed letter from Heidegger — was semi-listening, and I was desperate to be not-stupid. I made a quick calculation, figuring that my honest answer was innocuous and transcendent enough to escape any prodding. I responded, clearing one conversational hurdle and preparing my brain-legs for the next. Someone quipped about goony high school teachers ruining Gatsby and the discussion lurched elsewhere before I could try to explain why I loved the book. Equally grateful and slighted, I sipped some whiskey (barf) to celebrate the preservation of my 22-year-old intellectual persona.

Fast forward four years later, and I’m the goony high school teacher ruining The Great Gatsby for my juniors. I think that they’ve been lapping up Fitzgerald’s airy descriptions and delighting in Nick’s creepy-ish search for significance, and in my estimation, they’re about to fall to their cool denim knees upon reading the startlingly perfect last page with the classroom lights off and the windows open. As soon as my favorite student finishes reading aloud to us, she huffs, “Man, everyone in this book was such an asshole.” My face must look somewhat punched, because she backpedals with swift sincerity: “Sorry, Ms. D. I know you love this book, but…”

Again, with a new group of students, the space doesn’t open up for me to tease out my Gatsby love, because now we’re arguing about whether characters should be likeable if the reader's going to learn from them, and the way my students lean forward makes me realize that I don’t have to answer for the book yet — as long as I can help make this kind of discussion happen. After all, reading asks you to juggle what’s going on inside of you with what’s out there in the world, especially as you grow old and visit beautiful countries and do crazy stuff like become someone’s mom.

As I write this, I’m finishing my sixth year of teaching. I don’t teach Gatsby these days —too busy writing “persuasive” commercials for raw onions with 8th graders — but I’m still learning from it. Now, it meets me in a place where the green light switches from gorgeously abstract to kind of terrifying. Over and over, Gatsby demands that I stay alive to how time passes over my changing self, and I think that such aliveness is the very best thing I can ask of myself and my students: all of us future liars, generous juniors, and onion salespeople alike.