My wife and I went to different parties in the city on the same night last week. I was hoping she would also come to mine, but she didn't make it. She went home on her own. By the time I got home, it was 12:30 and she was in bed.
But the next morning, she had a bath and we talked about our parties.
She told me a story about her party that left me a little demoralized. She had lately reread The Great Gatsby, and her story was about Gatsby's world in New York, that shining, successful world that some of us get our feet into, or out of. The tragedy of Gatsby, my wife says, is that Gatsby is just in love and does everything he can to get back his love and there's nothing wrong with that, but the grasping New York world judges him as a pretender in a pink suit, and they murder him. All those people were just as pretending and aspiring in their time, so despite all Gatsby's pretenses, Fitzgerald is saying, That's no crime, it's just human, and this provincial innocent actually had a real dream. But that cold shallow successful world murdered him for it.
Well, then my wife had an encounter at the party that reminded her of the values clash in Gatsby.
Her story left me demoralized because I'd had a good night and didn't want to look at the world that way. A friend had a birthday party at a nice restaurant. He and his wife took a bunch of people out to dinner. There were a number of eccentrics and intellectuals at the big table, and it was fun, and I had the grace (for once) not to get into an argument, when it was offered, on the Vietnam War. Then later I was talking about blogging with one intellectual and journalist at one end, and I heard the host talking about the internet and ideas at the other end of the table.
So it was a serious dinner and a generous birthday party at the same time. I met my friend through Middle East stuff and journalism, we share an understanding. We're both politically engaged and though he and I differ somewhat, he's never made me feel guilty or weird about my thoughts on these subjects; which is unusual in New York, which can be hostile to eccentricity.
Then when I walked to the subway afterward, I saw my hosts on the subway too. They were going back to their hotel on the subway. We could have shared a cab, I suppose, but it was nice to talk more about the party on the train, about the personalities at the table.
I had a religious feeling about the evening. I'm not especially religious, I got a full portion of vanity. But I think of religion being the opposite of that shiny, successful, aspiring world. It's weird to me to think that I exchanged the success world for the religious world, but in some ways that's what this site is about.
