I find it rather ironic that Jay Gatsby has the ability to read people perfectly, yet the notion of opening a book and then going on to read it is seemingly preposterous to him. What ever did we do to make him so distant?
My cousin The Picture of Dorian Gray on the shelf below me doesn’t think we are to blame, and I would tend to agree with him. I don’t think Jay dislikes reading, I just don’t think he enjoys it either. He has so many other things to do in his busy billionaire life. None of which involve picking me off a shelf, of course.
He often walks into the library and just stands in the middle of the room, as though he were admiring his impressive collection. Yet when I look into his eyes, all I am able to detect is a vague emptiness. It has occurred, occasionally, that he take one of us in his hands and look at the cover, perhaps even daring to open the front page and skim over the first few words before tiring his eyes. I’ve never had the honour. Sometimes, I wonder if he is purposefully ignoring me. I think, though, that I might feel insulted if he made the effort of picking me up but didn’t bother carrying on to actually read me.
I remember once, not so long ago in fact, a drunk owl-eyed man from one of Jay’s parties stumbled into this very library. I’m rather proud to say he took quite a liking to me. Not only that, but he gently tipped me backwards to get a better look at my spine, and slid me out of my place. The touch of human hands on my cover, and the sound of my pages carefully being turned, one by one. Seeing things from a new angle was quite disconcerting in and of itself. I felt dazed when the owl-eyed man gently put me back in my spot. I distinctly remember hearing the owl-eyed man mentioning something about my cousins and I being “real books, with pages and everything”, a look of awe written across his face. I think he was expecting fake cardboard books.
Jay wants people to believe he is a well-educated Oxford man, but we all know he only spent four months there after the war. A handful of my cousins were brought here from Oxford, but he never read them. I get the impression he brought them here as a reminder to himself that he did, in fact, partially attend Oxford University. To convince others, one must first convince oneself.
What I love about being one of Jay’s books is that I get to hear so many different opinions regarding such an infinitely wide range of subjects varying from religion to unicorns. Another thing I love about belonging to him is the amount of things I hear from other humans who wander in here, trying to act ‘intellectual’ when they’re really too drunk off their own ego to notice our open ears, devouring every word they utter. They manage to come up with the most absurd rumours you could imagine about how Jay became who he is. However the facts remain unexamined, quite like my cousins and I.
I think it a tragedy that a mind as intricate as his be wasted on the wild imaginings of a man in love with impossibility. What has love ever done for humanity? It has caused wars, deaths, grief… Don’t tell The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling that. He’ll simply say love is what we owe our existence to.
I suppose I rather like my owner, however hypocritical he may be. Although in his defence, he is ‘in love’, as The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling would phrase it, and I wouldn’t be here if he weren’t.
Why would Jay Gatsby feel the need to own a book entitled Out Of Love if not to remind him love isn’t an amount like his money, but an emotion who’s persistence keeps one going?