Way back in nineteen sixty six I attended an English class at the University of St. Thomas with my high school mates. It was a recruitment effort that convinced several of my friends to apply for admission there. I was dead set on attending the University of Houston so I did not seek to attend the school even though they offered me a generous scholarship. Nonetheless, the visit there was quite memorable for two reasons. 

Firstly, we visited a professor in the music department who was the director of the choir. I have to admit that he was a rather charismatic fellow who made singing feel incredibly appealing even for someone like me who had no interest in using my ordinary voice to forge a future career. I vividly recall how energetic he was and how the students appeared to be very much enjoying their time with him. It would be many years later that I would hear about him again in a rather strange incident. 

He ended up leaving his post at St. Thomas and leading a rather strange cult that somehow believed that the group was destined to be picked up by alien beings who would take them on a spiritual tour of the universe. On an appointed day the members dressed in spacesuits and took enough sleep medication to kill themselves. They were supposed to then be transported to outer space for their journey beyond death but of course that never happened. 

I actually had a sense of why the individuals might have followed the leader who had once been a choir director. I had seen for myself how exciting he was but he still wasn’t magical enough for me to change my major and choice of university so I suppose that his pull was only minimally strong. Still, he managed to convince others to follow him into a rather ridiculous mass suicide. 

The other class that struck me even more and almost tempted me to apply for admission to the school was an English class in which the students and professor were discussing The Great Gatsby. I was incredibly well read by then thanks to my English teacher who required us to read and report on a book each week, but somehow the classic by F. Scott Fitzgerald had not found its way to my hands. 

After listening to the professor rhapsodizing about the brilliance of the book I literally rushed out to secure a copy and read it from beginning to end in a single sitting. It instantly became one of my all time favorite books, but in reading it at different junctures in my life I have reacted to the characters in many different ways depending on my level of intellectual growth. In spite of my own maturation and changing worldviews I found the story and characters more and more interesting over time. 

The Great Gatsby is celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of its publication in 1925 and it seems never to grow stale. If anything it continues to have more and more universal appeal as readers react to the themes of our humanity presented so beautifully in the story. It forces us to consider the nature of power and wealth, unrequited love, societies of haves and have nots, issues as modern as today’s news. Somehow Fitzgerald tapped into the physiological and sociological natures of our American story, creating a tragedy that speaks to us all. 

The Great Gatsby is Shakespearian and modern in its depiction of characters and situations. it easily translates to new generations of readers from one era to the next. It has spawned movies and plays and much discussion in the years since it first came to be. Artists have used their own creativity with visuals and music to suggest new interpretations of the story. Both the depth and the shallowness of the characters might be credibly applied to our present times of materialism, struggles between oligarchs and common folk pressing to be accepted as equals. I suppose the true nature of the story that Fitzgerald wrote expresses all of our longings and disappointments in our efforts to be seen and accepted. 

After the visit to St. Thomas I went on to major in English at the University of where I encountered first class professors but few of them were as outstanding as the one that I witnessed on that high school field trip that so inspired me. I’ve often thought of the English professore who introduced me the a classic that seems to only become better each time I read it. I have been grateful for the inspiration that he demonstrated. I ended up teaching mathematics because of my minor but I did my best to put a bit more excitement into my classes because of what I had seen on that day and how it made me feel. I realized that it only takes a single moment to make a difference in an individual’s life. Such a moment has stayed with me to this very day.