In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s eponymous hero views Nick Carraway’s statement that ‘you can’t repeat the past,’ with contempt. ‘Can’t repeat the past’ [Gatsby] cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can repeat the past!’
I’ve always had an ambivalent fascination with the character of Jay Gatsby. Like he did for Carraway, on some level he ‘represented everything for which I have unaffected scorn.’ And yet ‘there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.’
His ‘incorruptible dream’ endures on some level beyond the realms of normal people’s understanding, existing with such undiminished purity in spite of whatever means he may have used in its pursuit and whatever evidence of Daisy – the representation of that dream – not being worthy in return.
For Gatbsy, of course, whose dream Fitzgerald likens to the first settlers who seeing ‘a fresh, green breast of the new world [were] face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder,’ the irony is that this reality will never truly compare (Americans take note). Hence the focus on some transcendent moment from his past, for when Gatsby ‘forever wed his unutterable visions to [Daisy’s] perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.’
I’ve been thinking about these ideas a lot recently, aware that, on some level, my own reignited flame and my decision to return to playing cricket, 18 years on from one perfect summer, might be seen as an attempt to prove to myself (and perhaps to others) that ‘of course you can repeat the past!’ Moreover, perhaps it isn’t just an attempt to repeat the past but, rather, to change it.
While living in South Africa in my early twenties, I interviewed an artist named Paul Emmanual for The Cape Times. Emmanuel’s latest exhibition had comprised a series of what, from a distance, looked like black and white photos, each of significant stages in people’s lives – births, marriages, deaths etc.
However, on closer inspection they were actually etchings, painstakingly scratched onto photographic paper over many months. For Emmanuel, while the pictures themselves represented that liminal state, itself fleeting, as one crosses a threshold, the process of his work served to remind us of all the tiny moments which led us to that specific point in time.
While I have, of course, crossed a number of thresholds in my 35 years on this planet, my father’s death has been the most significant. That it precipitated not only a major life change, insomuch as I decided to move home in order to take care of him and my mother, but was also so closely followed by the pandemic has only served to exacerbate this feeling.
Not long after his cancer diagnosis, I was getting ready to tee off in the St. John’s President’s Cup golf tournament. The President at the time, Dr. Frank Salmon, made special effort to offer me his thoughts, his comforts and his prayers. ‘Such is life,’ I told him, unsure of what else to say, to which he responded ‘yes, but it only ever happens to somebody else.’
Of course, this is true up until the point that it isn’t and, through the grief of my father’s death there has been another suffering – a realisation of my own ‘perishable breath.’ The irony, of course, is that life is standing still just at the time that I am most conscious of its passing – stuck, as we all are, in a liminal state and, as such, acutely aware of its existence.
Within that state one can’t help but be reflective and I’ve become cognisant of the fact that when you cross a threshold you can never return to being the person you were beforehand. e.e. cummings expresses this idea beautifully and with such brevity. ‘who are you, little i/(five or six years old)/peering from some high/window; at the gold/of november sunset/(and feeling: that if day/has to become night/this is a beautiful way)’? He is aware that the person he once was is still there inside of him but there is a struggle to recognise them, so different do they seem.
My father was a cricket lover but, conversely, he inherited his love of the sport from me – the idyll of summer weekends spent in impossibly picturesque Oxfordshire villages where he designated himself as the ‘highest scorer in the league.’ I should add for clarification that this was an under 13 competition, he was the scorer for our team and he was six foot three.
Twenty years on and three weeks before he died, we sat high in the Allen Stand watching Jofra Archer bowl what will be looked back on as one of the most thrilling spells by an English fast bowler in a generation, culminating in Steve Smith being knocked near unconscious. It was an hour of test cricket where one was, quite literally, unable to take one's eye off the ball – before, of course, Smith did.
However, previous to that, we had spent a wonderful hour and a half in the Lord’s media centre, invited by Vic Marks, a man of most generous spirit. My father worried aloud that perhaps we were preventing him from getting on with his work. ‘Don’t worry’ replied Vic. ‘I’m sure I won’t miss anything important.’
For me, that represents what is wonderful about the longer forms of the game. The cadence is such that it allows for the ebb and flow of one’s attention span; not the intensity of 90 minutes of football, followed by euphoria or desperation but rather pockets of play where you are glued to your seats, with spaces either side to find some sort of equilibrium.
Indeed, if Bobby Jones said that ‘golf is the closest game to the game we call life’ then perhaps life is the closest game to the game we call cricket. Long lulls that seem to pass us by followed by sudden passages of greater excitement (of course not forgetting to stop three times a day to eat), it is a condition of near constant failures interspersed with rare successes.
Sometimes those failures are minor – a failure to score or take a wicket off an individual ball – and, at other times, they possess greater finality. And, at the end, the scorecard – while often the best we have - completely fails to tell the real story.
To return to Fitzgerald, he may as well have been talking about cricket when he said ‘life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.’
Just over a year ago, I stood up in front of the 1,200 people who had gathered for my father’s memorial service (a number limited by capacity rather than volition) and I spoke about the finality of death – a concept that seems so obvious but, until you have lost someone so close to you, is hard to imagine.
‘But while death may be final,’ I said, ‘the words of a hymn have been rolling around in my brain. ‘Thine be the Glory, Risen, Conquering Son. Endless is the victory, thou’er over death has won.’
'My father may not have conquered death – an unfortunate truth about life – but his memory and his inspiration will live on in the hearts of everyone who gathered in the chapel today and the countless others that he had touched over the years.' Just like in cricket, its end does not diminish a great innings.
So perhaps Carraway is right; perhaps ‘you can’t repeat the past.’ Maybe Irvin Yalom, the existential analyst, says it best. ‘Pause as you stare into the photograph of the younger you. Let the poignant moment sweep over you and linger a bit; taste the sweetness of it as well as the bitterness. [For the] way to value life, the way to feel compassion for others, the way to love anything with greatest depth is to be aware that these experiences are destined to be lost.’
But, at the same time, while cricket may not have loved me with the same loyalty and intensity with which I loved it, while the sport as an institution is full of the flaws of humans and while I almost certainly can’t repeat the past, I still want to believe the game can exist in some pure transcendent state – a meritocracy at its very heart - where joy is felt through the process itself rather than the result.
If not, I’ll always have that perfect memory of an hour at Lord’s, watching Jofra Archer bowling at 95mph against the best batsman of our generation, as I held hands with my brilliant father, both enraptured into silence.
