It might be entirely impossible to change one’s own mind. If you believe something to be true, the very idea of autonomously altering that belief can seem ridiculous; at most, some sort of thought experiment, and at the very least, the feeling that you are simply lying to yourself.
However, people change their minds all the time. External pressures are constantly calling our subjective beliefs into question, and I am finding that as I get older (and wiser), the two rhetorical boxes into which I sorted the “truths” and “falsities” of the universe are made of old, wet cardboard. They are incredibly ineffective at keeping “true” and “false” things where I initially put them, because I continue to add information to each item, and the consequence of this is that they are too pointy, irregular and big to fit into such a weak and squishy container.
This column is a personal project of mine in which I revisit books that I read in high school. Earlier this year, I caught myself defending interpretations and analysis of these works for which I had very little basis, save for the fact that I remembered feeling such a way about them on first reading—eight years ago.
I then found myself working in a high school with students who seemed very confident about their opinions on just about everything they saw. In one particular science class, I tried to get the students to accept that no matter how strongly morally opposed they felt to people cloning their deceased pets, that did not make the one girl who disagreed objectively wrong.
You won’t be surprised to learn that I was unsuccessful in my attempt to reach common ground, but I was certainly surprised to hear the word “heathen” used in a biology class in 2026 to dismiss someone who disagreed with one’s subjective opinion. Heathen! I was never so headstrong and arrogant about my beliefs…
No, of course I was! We have all been 16-year-olds who knew everything there was to possibly know: that’s how Bob Dylan in “My Back Pages” came up with the line “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”
The wet cardboard in my brain decomposes more each year, because learning more about the world teaches me that nearly everything is complicated and nuanced. Having unwavering conviction about subjective ideas does not necessarily mean you have it all figured out; it might mean instead that you have kept your world small and simple enough to file neatly away.
Which brings me to The Great Gatsby. I didn’t like it in high school: it left no lasting impression on me, and I felt strongly that those who adored it were putting on some sort of act. I called it flat, empty and overrated, and I filed that away as truth.
For fans of the novel, I wish I could turn around and sing its praises on my re-read of it, but I can’t. I can say, however: it was good! I liked reading it! It certainly meant more to me now than it did in high school, and the reasons for this are embarrassingly obvious: What does a 16-year-old know about regret? What experiences does a high-school student have that would warrant yearning?
Jay Gatsby lives in constant pursuit of a past life to which he can never return, while teenagers have barely started their lives to begin with. This is not to say that I, in my wise, old age of 24, know the ins and outs of regret, but at least I could conceptualize it during my re-read.
I could recall much of the content as I read it, which made me feel even more embarrassed that I had brazenly defended my opinions on it. I have never been one to re-read books (unless we’re talking about the Twilight series, I do NOT mess around about the Twilight series), but The Great Gatsby revealed to me one of the primary benefits of revisiting books from your past: since the novel hasn’t changed after its publication in 1925, the variable in this re-reading experiment is the reader!
How curious, how much one changes without even having to decide to change! And if one didn’t have an opinion about these works to begin with, you wouldn’t have this portal to compare past you and present you. So, while I am advocating for re-reading, I am—as always—advocating for reading in the first place.
The Great Gatsby was written and published in the 1920s, but it reads like satire written decades later, like a critical reflection on the events leading up to the Great Depression. The billboard of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes overlooks a dusty wasteland; extravagant spending and conspicuous consumption, and as trite as it may be, the pursuit of the American dream all serve to show how the depression was obviously imminent, yet Gatsby’s exorbitant decor in his West Egg mansion shrouded what we now see as the writing on the wall.
Either Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby with a clairvoyant pen, or hindsight is 20/20, and Fitzgerald was only encapsulating this life of luxury that preceded the Great Depression. What better way to interpret history than through a lens of dramatic irony! We, the all-knowing audience, can read The Great Gatsby and feel superior to all those rich old sports because we know something they don’t! The novel has not been altered since 1925, which makes each comment on wealth, on the economy, on the future leaden with dread.
People always talk about how much they missed on their first read-through of a book; how much is missed by not reading it at all? Now, I’m no mathematician, but if someone misses some percentage of meaning, content, and impact on their first read-through of a book, those who do not read that book at all are missing more than 100 per cent of meaning, content, and impact. I say greater than 100 per cent because books are not passive recollections of the world around us, but actively shape culture and our perception of history. One hundred per cent familiarization with a piece of literature means that it ceases to exist within the confines of a front and back cover, and runneth over into your understanding of the world in which it exists.
