Brace yourself because something is
rare is about to happen. In fact, I’d suggest you sit down. Done it? Settled?
Well, here goes. I, Gregory Peter O’Hara of Warrington, Englandshire have a
confession to make: I got something wrong.
Gasp! Shock! Horror! There, I said
it. It’s not something that happens often – or at all for that matter – but
alas, there it is! I finally admit that I got something wrong.
What did I get wrong you might ask? Well
bear with me a second and I’ll give you some context. A few years ago I read The Great Gatsby at college and hated
it. Now when I say hated it, believe me I hated it. Loathed it. Despised it.
Deplored it. Wished death upon it. I really did. As with poetry and
Shakespeare, it was one of those things that the crushing omnipotence of
pre-University education seeks to break down into a series of images, motifs,
characters and quotes for us to regurgitate in exams, get many millions of
marks and progress further on the path to the real world.
The problem with this however, is
that intense learning of one particular thing can, in the most part, lead to
irrational hatred for that one thing. In secondary school it was Shakespeare
and poetry, as before mentioned, and in college it was very much the life and
times of Mr. Jay Gatsby (all three of which, having returned to them with a
fresh and open university-student frame of mind, I found a real passion for).
In fact, my recent re-reading of The
Great Gatsby made me almost want to punch myself in the face for ever
thinking negatively about it.
I was reminded of my hated of the
book after I had spoken about the upcoming film adaptation with my Mum whose
precise words were, “you hated that book and said that there was literally no
point to it” and I cringed with embarrassment in hindsight after having
experienced it again.
Individuals may disagree, but I
certainly don’t think of myself as an ignorant person. I may be many things but
ignorant is not one of them, especially when it comes to the appreciation of
anything under the gaudy umbrella of ‘culture.’ In this instance however, I
will hold my hands up and completely agree on how ignorant I was about that
book. At a time when my literary chops weren’t really there, I saw it as nothing
more than a boring expose of high-class culture during the Jazz Age of America.
Of course, I’m not for one second trying to say that my chops are fully
developed now, just slightly more on their way.
And although that summation is essentially
the crooks of the novel, this time around I saw much more of a point to it. And
rather than trying to break it down into the component parts of the green light
and the bespectacled eyes, when it is viewed as a piece of literary art, it
exposes itself as a magnificent critique and exploration of that free-living,
20’s lifestyle – something that other people around me had seen and appreciated
and that I had despised. I don’t know, I guess there can sometimes be something
really uninspiring about the sterility of a classroom.
Now, dear reader, here we reach the
meat of the point. Apart from trying to make myself come to terms with my
ignorance on this subject, I suppose it was also a way of trying to instigate
some sort of passion in you. Trying to restore your faith in perhaps returning
to a book or film that you hated and never watched again. Just try and either
read or watch it again now that you have a few more years under your belt. You
just might discover a lost treasure; something amazing that you’ll cherish
forever having previously wanting to kill it with fire.
I appreciate that this won’t work for
everything (for instance if your hated film is Titanic or any of the Transformers
I wouldn’t bother, they will always be terrible), but if not, give it a go.
Try something old today. Give it
another go; you never know what you might find.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past.”
