Evanescence—But Not the Band

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

I'm reading The Great Gatsby again. When I began reading it the other day, I remembered a post I made last time I read it called "On My Third First Reading." I didn't reread the post, but I couldn't remember what I meant by that title. What was a "third first reading"? I'm sure I had thought it was very clever when I wrote it.

For days, that question bounced around slowly in the back of my mind like the DVD symbol screen saver. Today, as I read Chapter 3 of Gatsby, I frowned and sighed.

The book didn't feel the same. Instead of feeling ethereal and enchanting, Gatsby's parties felt...superficial and sarcastic and sad. I've been to many parties where there were "enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names," but while the deliberate evanescence of such parties felt fitting in college, now they feel...sort of spiteful and unsatisfying.

Maybe this poor impression was because a Gatsby-hating friend had recently put some disparaging ideas into my mind. Maybe it was because I've been pretty overwhelmed and depressed for a couple of weeks.

Maybe it just depends on how you're feeling when you read it, I thought dejectedly.  I guess I've never read the book feeling exactly the way I do right now.

And that's when it hit me again: that's what I meant two years ago. YOU can never read the same book twice. You can read the same BOOK twice, but YOU will always be different.

This is my fourth first reading: my first time reading The Great Gatsby at age twenty-nine, about to release four chapters of the Fire Faery Story to beta readers,  having just paid an unexpected $1800 for bloodwork, after surprise-starting my period two days early while wearing white pants at a coffee shop, with Nana in the hospital, since beginning therapy for the first time, with an undercut.

Part of me is desperate to recapture the inexhaustible joy I felt the first few times I read The Great Gatsby; but another part of me respects this "first reading" theory too much to wish away this next impression.

This won't be the last time I read The Great Gatsby. I hope it will come around again for me, but if it doesn't, well...

You can't repeat the past.

~Stephanie