Gatsby in Maryland

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and vivid chronicler of the Jazz Age, is buried in lil unassuming Rockville, a little down the road from where I live.

Not too long ago, friends told me that the novelist who portrayed America's shining possibilities (and also the darker reverse side of the American Dream) had links to historic Rockville.

The optimist in me loves the line about Gatsby having "some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life."

I guess I'm talking about Gatsby now because I'm hurriedly blogging the many byways of my personal journey in America as my departure looms.

Also, I'm now reading the memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran" which has startling passages about the time when author and professor Azar Nafisi ingeniously put The Great Gatsby and his dream on trial in her University of Tehran class. It forced her students to take sides, in the days when Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution began closing down the country.

My Books

I'm 50 pages into "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and it's a mesmerizing journey. Azar Nafisi's memoir is such a celebration of the power of the literary imagination in fundamentalist Iran.

Like many readers, I surround myself with books that pool luxuriously here and there, and these days I'm actually reading!

Recent gifts from friends and choices from my happy browsing include:

Common Sense 101: Lessons from G.K. Chesterton - Dale Ahlquist (Wonder-stirring)

100 Year Bloom: Your Keys to Living in Permanent Revival - Mahesh & Bonnie Chavda (My Singapore friend suggested that I visit their ministry in NC. I checked and saw that they were headed to the DC region for three days! Powerful time.)

My Life - Bill Clinton (Hey, only 25 cents from a yard sale!)

The Etiquette of English Tea - Beryl Peters

Neu Me Thich (If You Like, Mom) - Trangdai Tranguyen (Luminous reflections on parental love, the immigrant experience and more)

I won't be shipping much stuff home. But books are friends, so they'll go with me.

Wonder! Galaxies & GK Chesterton

Image: Dead Star Creates Celestial Havoc
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A friend gave me a book on his intellectual hero, GK Chesterton. I know his poems, but he's like the author and thinker I was waiting to discover! The first chapter I flipped to was titled "Wonder," my favourite concept!

Chesterton, a larger-than-life London journalist who wrote memorably in the early 20th century, said of wonder:

"The function of imagination is... not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders."

"A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of five is excited by bein told that Tommy opened a door."

My high-spirited unstoppable nephew Caleb is five. The world is new and wondrous to him, even the littlest things. This early waker popped into my room one morning. I told him my new alarm clock would chime soon. A ho-hum everyday moment? Caleb's eyes widened and his mouth formed a surprised O in the half-light when the tinkling tune began.

One of my best Bible Studies highlighted Jacob and his dream of the stairway to Heaven, with angels ascending and descending on it. (Genesis 28:10-15). It didn't matter that his pillow was a rock and he was a fugitive. Wonder can still be our experience in woeful circumstances. We're alive to possibilities!

In my life, God embedded a special wonder when I was five or six. I was lying on the grass on Fort Canning Hill and suddenly I became aware of stars and infinity in the early evening sky. The Creator of the galaxies is also an intimate God who pursues us in love. We and the cosmos fall down in worship before God.