Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember
that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
- Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby
Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his vehement
and intense critique of high society of the 1920s, and for which his The Great Gatsby stands a powerful
testimony!
It’s quite surprising that, even way back in the
1920s, Fitzgerald’s focus is more on a technologically-driven,
consumer-fixated, ‘leisure-class’ society which is beautifully brought to life
in this novel.
The impact and the influence of this
technocentrism is exemplified in many instances throughout the novel.
Sample this –
There
was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred
oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a
butler's thumb!
Renowned critic Jennifer McClinton-Temple
remarks on the novel that,
The
modern world Fitzgerald depicts in The Great Gatsby - with its
artificial distinctions between West Egg and East Egg; its social caste system
that leads Myrtle Wilson to have no more value than an animal; and its
monumental Valley of Ashes, an artificial barrier separating the rich and the
poor, brought about by capitalism and industrialization - suggests a world that
will eventually alienate us all from one another by replacing honesty and
emotion with facade and ambition.
An intense observation at that!
Well, the quote that opens this blog-post, forms
the very opening lines to the novel.
Chapter One begins thus –
In
my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've
been turning over in my mind ever since.
Whenever
you feel like criticising anyone, he told me, just
remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that
you've had.
He
didn't say any more!
How much they make sense to us!
Let’s together take a mindful resolve to
encourage and to motivate others as much as possible, and also take an equal
resolve to stay far away from people who have made it their life’s only ambition
to indulge in ‘negative criticism’ all of the time on all of the people that come
under their ‘watchful eyes’!
As Jidduji has rightly observed, ‘To observe
without evaluating or passing judgment is the highest form of intelligence’!
Let’s get ourselves this ‘highest form of intelligence’
from today on, rightaway at that!
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