I am unsure what my old English Literature teacher, Bruce Ritchie, would have made of this chapter. I count myself blessed to have been taught by him at A-level, and having grown up in a house that was not especially into books or English literature (that is some understatement), it was no mean feat of his to inspire our class of somewhat lazy, precocious late adolescents to read at all. And then to begin to love reading. Here, I do mean ‘love’. I have never stopped since. That said, my adult novel habit would probably have disappointed Bruce. It is rarefied by any measure. I read exceptionally, very few novels – perhaps one or two a year – and mostly choose to graze on history, politics, theology and social theory. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was one of the set texts for our A-level class, and it is some 45 years since I sat in Bruce Ritchie’s class at his feet, as we debated the text with one another and its multiple layers of meaning.
Bruce Ritchie was a genuinely brilliant teacher and a master of conversational pedagogy. He inspired in me a love of later twentieth-century American writers’ works, which include John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), and the complete works of Garrison Keillor and his Prairie Home Companion. That said, what I want to explore here is the implicit religion in Gatsby – and even touch, classically, on the concept of an apophatic God. That is to say that God is not to be found in either emptiness or fullness, consumption or poverty, but is rather known only by total absence.
Edward Bailey’s Implicit Religion Network began in 1968 and spawned numerous books, a journal and pioneering conferences. Its study concentrates upon those aspects of everyday life the understanding of which may be enhanced if we ask whether they might have, within them, some sort of inherent religiosity of their own. While many other terms, such as ‘civil religion’ have some degree of overlap with this area of interest, the Implicit Religion Network consistently sought to study everyday life in non-reductionist modes as potential expressions of ‘secular faith’. The threefold paradigm of interpretive Implicit Religion proposed by Bailey and his colleagues focussed on secular events and everyday occurrences that exhibited ‘commitments, integrating foci, andintensive concerns with extensive effects’. A fourth aspect, namely personal depth, was later added to make this a quadrilateral.
In some respects, Bailey’s quadrilateral paradigm resonates with Hartmut Rosa’s Resonanz: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World.The Jena sociology professor proposed a model for resonance that was horizontal (between/relational), vertical (abstract/ontological), diagonal (materials, practices), and with ‘the self’ – the internal sense of connection/alienation. Gatsby is in some sense a novel of broken resonances with all Rosa’s categories. We find misplaced nostalgia, with the past romanticised being harmful (even a killer). There is cognitive dissonance and false memory syndrome (e.g., Leon Festinger), and, arguably, the Implicit Religion (after Edward Bailey) of T.J. Eckleburg’s glasses.
The Great Gatsby (1925) is a short novel, and it is part of a body of work that comprised a handful of novels (e.g., The Beautiful and the Damned and Tender Is the Night), over 160 short stories, some screenplays and several essays. In all this, The Great Gatsby has endured as a serious contender for the great American novel, and I think its time has come again. Fitzgerald’s success as a novelist gave him access to an affluent lifestyle as a successful writer in the exclusive Long Island ‘social scene’ – to be both seductive and repulsive. Think of The Kardashians, The Only Way Is Essex or Made in Chelsea but now set a hundred years ago – a world of affluence and conspicuous consumption. But a gaudy world and trying too hard – lacking in class, depth and discernment. And yet, for many viewers, almost grimly absorbing.
Fitzgerald’s novels depicted the flamboyance and excesses of the ‘Jazz Age’ – a term which, although he did not originate it, was one he nevertheless popularised. Gatsby is semi-autobiographical. Whilst at Princeton, the 19-year-old Fitzgerald met Ginevra King, a 16-year-old socialite with whom he fell madly in love. However, Ginevra’s family strongly discouraged Fitzgerald’s pursuit of their daughter due to his ‘lower-class’ status, and her father allegedly told the young Fitzgerald that ‘poor boys shouldn’t even think of marrying rich girls’.
Smitten but rejected, Fitzgerald signed up for the Great War draft in 1917. While stationed in Alabama, he fell in love with another rich socialite named Zelda Sayre. She also rejected him due to his financial situation, but then did agree to marry Fitzgerald after he had published his commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The marriage was always troubled, however, with Zelda eventually being committed to a psychiatric hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Fitzgerald struggled with his novel-writing career after the Great Depression, following from the Wall Street Crash in 1929, though he found Hollywood to be a reliable source of income; he settled in there as a screenwriter, and continued to write for newspapers. But his lifelong struggle with alcohol abuse finally took its toll, and he died of a cardiac arrest in 1940, aged only 44.
The Jazz Age may have passed, but this past is by no means a foreign country. The 1920s were an age of heightened awareness of racism with the Ku Klux Klan and the murder of the Osage Indians. Nationalism was at a peak, with public and political demands to control immigration. Fascist and Communist autocracies threatened social democracy, with de-colonisation, early feminism, civil war and revolution also playing their part in shaping a world of febrile uncertainty. Famines, earthquakes and epidemics (e.g., Spanish ’Flu) accounted for millions of deaths in the wake of the already costly Great War.
Re-reading the novel 40 years later, one cannot escape the stain and stigma of shame that most of the characters carry. The majority seek to evade the shadow of shame through conspicuous consumption, excessive drinking, illicit affairs, social climbing (clambering, really) and forms of abrogation that leave us with characters who seem invested in forgetting the past and present. There is no religion in the novel, yet there is this sense of unshifting sin that pre-stains the actors, gradually hemming in the characters, enclosing them, and ultimately overwhelming them in further episodes and events that will need to be left behind. Yet can’t be. This is a novel of consequences, yet it offers little hope of any redemption.
The past, it seems, is not a foreign country. It is a place from which few can expect to escape. The past catches up with everyone. Gatsby is pretty realistic about the power of life’s currents: it is hard to not get pulled back to where you began, to what you started as. Varieties of shame stalk each of the characters, and their strategies for avoidance resemble a futile fictional character trying to escape their own shadow. This dark Greek tragedy is set in the 1920s: fate is fickle, but no hero will emerge. In this, the character of Jay Gatsby is a much a rumour as the central character of Fitzgerald’s novel. Gatsby is a phantom in the story, emerging as a kind of shape-shifter in the world of hedonists and gangsters.
The Great Gatsby is alive to many of the issues that are familiar to us today. A world where ‘new money’ (nouveau-riche) cannot buy its way into an elite and educated upper class despite everything it has acquired. Affluenza does not bring with it any acceptance to the prevailing establishment. Old money inherited wealth, and the intelligentsia can still evoke sneering amusement, patronising fascination and barely disguised contempt for the newly wealthy. Fitzgerald originally titled his novel Under the Red, White and Blue, and there is no reason to suppose he did not envisage the stars and stripes of the American flag here, with his story being a barely concealed critique of contemporary culture. The novel’s original title is a withering critique of ‘Make America Great Again, and its wealthy proponents, with their brash new money or old established financial security protected by breeding.
What, I wonder, would Fitzgerald have made of Donald Trump’s absurd wealth, mainly built on debt, his excessive consumerist desires in our viral ‘affluenza’? All of it lacking in class and depth, and yet Trump was somehow installed in the White House? In some respects, Gatsby gives us an archetype for the here and now. A century ago, Fitzgerald’s novel gave us class, money and education, and a restless struggle for social acceptance – all set against a culture of shocking indifference, personal shame, shady pasts and unspoken shadow vices. Indeed, speaking the truth and being open and honest is hard for most of the characters in the novel. The veneer of mannered socialising suffocates so much of their conversation and is only occasionally pierced by sharp retorts and flashes of flint-like insight that leave most readers flinching.
Set in the Jazz Age, arguably like our time, this was a morally permissive culture at a time when many Americans had also become disillusioned with prevailing social norms and so easily prey to self-gratification. As then, so now. The gold-hatted lover is a trinket figure of pity, not desire. Fitzgerald’s novel is set on the prosperous Long Island of 1922. If he were writing today, Gatsby would be set somewhere like Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in Florida. And be a reality TV show too. For Long Island, I fear we’d have another Love Island spin-off.
Fitzgerald was similar to Jay Gatsby in some respects, in that he fell in love while a military officer stationed far from home and then sought success to prove himself to the woman he loved. However, Fitzgerald’s discreet allusions to bootlegging as the source of Jay Gatsby’s fortune are where Fitzgerald chooses to inhabit the voice of the narrator, Nick Carraway, for much of the book. The novel is set in the year 1922. Carraway – a Yale alumnus from the Midwest and a veteran of the Great War – rents a bungalow in the Long Island village of West Egg, next to a luxurious estate inhabited by one Jay Gatsby, an enigmatic multi-millionaire who hosts dazzling soirées – yet does not partake in them. One evening, Nick dines with his distant relative, Daisy Buchanan, in the fashionable town of East Egg. Daisy is married to Tom Buchanan, formerly a Yale football star whom Nick knew during his college days. The couple have recently relocated from Chicago to a colonial mansion directly across the bay from Gatsby’s estate. In the novel, then, size matters. And the Buchanans are ‘old money’ and ‘establishment’. Tom Buchanan regards Gatsby as vulgar ‘new money’ – pink-suited, vulgar exemplar of swindlers who grasp at the thin chance to be welcomed into the fold of older established elites. In truth, the newly-monied will always looked down on and despised. Buchanan has class and pedigree that Gatsby cannot purchase. Both men know this. Gatsby’s brash wealth cannot buy breeding. The novel sneers at meritocracy.
And yet it seems that the Jazz Age in Gatsby is also one of almost uncontrollable momentum and roaring propulsion. At their palatial mansion, Carraway encounters Jordan Baker, an insolent ‘flapper’ and golf champion who is Daisy’s childhood friend. Jordan confides to Nick that Tom keeps a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, married to George, the hapless owner of a local car garage. The Wilsons’ home is in the ‘valley of ashes’ a sprawling refuse dump of cheap housing. The novel explores Gatsby’s love for Daisy and Tom’s infidelity. The valley of ashes is a kind of twilight zone. As I reflect on the shadow of shame I mentioned earlier, what is striking about this place is that it is a ‘valley of the shadows’, and akin to Psalm 23 without any of the aid or comfort that the same psalm offers.
Nick Carraway, the central narrator of the novel, is initially attracted to Jordan Baker – an insolent, bored, hard, wealthy, cynical, glamorous, sexual, attractive woman, careless towards others and about them, who ‘never sweats’, and who shared a ‘white girlhood’ with Daisy Buchanan. Tom Buchanan is, meanwhile, a white racist, something of a thug and bully, anti-Semitic and sexist. Gatsby showcases rich arrogance that is unkind and uncaring. Tycoons are presented as super-rich moguls with extravagant, gaudy tastes, conspicuous wealth and consumption, excessive spending, and a lack of accountability, truth and justice. There is a prurient, consumerist fascination with the lives of the ultra-elite new-money wealthy. The ‘little people’ around them who long to be in the company of the wealthy and flamboyant elite become expendable playthings. The novel is set in lake of vast carelessness. Those who play upon the waters care nothing for those who drown.
Daisy, Tom and Jordan might almost serve as archetypes for the 2020s rather than the 1920s. The rules just don’t seem to apply to the rich in Gatsby. When Nick Carraway discovers Jordan brazenly cheating at golf, he is shocked but hardly surprised. Characters lie with impunity and are ‘incurably dishonest’. Other themes in the novel include dreadful driving, excessive drinking to oblivion, casual anti-Semitism and racism, classism, and condescension towards others.
Carraway discovers that Gatsby and Daisy met around 1917 when Gatsby was an officer in the American Expeditionary Forces. They fell in love, but when Gatsby was deployed overseas, Daisy married Tom. Gatsby entertains the unreal hope that his newfound wealth and dazzling parties will make Daisy reconsider. The parties are opulent affairs, in which girls come and go like moths to a flame, bedazzled by the champagne, starry nights and unhinged freedoms of the jazz age. It is against this background of flitsome parties that Gatsby uses Nick as a go-between to stage a reunion with Daisy, and the two then embark upon an intense sexual affair.
The novel closes with the relationships all unravelling – and with tragic consequences. Tom discovers the affair when Daisy carelessly addresses Gatsby with unabashed intimacy in front of him. Gatsby insists that Daisy declare that she never loved Tom. Daisy claims she loves Tom and Gatsby, upsetting both of them. She is unsure and unstable: literally a ‘flapper’ who flits and flips. Tom then discloses that Gatsby is just a swindler whose money comes from bootlegging alcohol. Learning of this, Daisy elects to stay with Tom. The affair with Gatsby is over. Daisy chooses security, not love.
That evening, Tom scornfully instructs Gatsby to drive her home, knowing that Daisy will never leave Tom. While returning, Gatsby and Daisy drive by George and Myrtle Wilson’s garage; Myrtle, remember, is Tom’s mistress. Myrtle sees Tom’s car coming towards them and tries to flag down the car she supposes her lover is driving. But Daisy is driving, and Gatsby is the passenger. Daisy accidentally runs over Myrtle, killing her instantly. Actually, she mows Myrtle down, and does not stop. Casual, uncaring brutality is another theme of the book. Myrtle is a dirt-poor victim of a traffic accident, hit-and-run roadkill. Who really cares?
Gatsby later reveals to Nick that Daisy was driving the car, but that he intends to take the blame for the accident to protect her. Nick urges Gatsby to flee to avoid prosecution, but he refuses. After Tom tells George that it was Gatsby driving who struck Myrtle, a distraught George assumes the vehicle’s owner must be Myrtle’s lover (in fact, it was Tom Buchanan). George then fatally shoots Gatsby in his mansion’s swimming pool, and then commits suicide using the same gun.
After Gatsby’s murder and George’s suicide, Nick meets Gatsby’s father, Henry C. Gatz, a ‘solemn’ and ‘helpless’ old man who believed his son had a bright future. Mr Gatz also discovers and shares with Nick records of Gatsby’s self-improvement routines, saying ‘Jimmy was bound to get ahead’. Nick organises Gatsby’s funeral. Almost nobody comes. Nick concludes:
as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning –
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past[ECG1] [MP2] .
Over the years, aspects of the book have continued to catch up with me. I have read the book several times and am struck by how relevant it is for our time. The senseless amoral hedonism reminds me of how much of the conspicuous consumption that surrounds all the characters simply ends up consuming them. There is no God referred to, and no religion or any kind of faith that any of the characters seem to be able to turn towards or ever lean on.
Indeed, Gatsby’s father seems to cling to the disciplined life his son led as some sort of redemptive hope at the end of the book at Gatsby’s funeral. Henry Gatsby is moved to share his son’s carefully written schedule and routine with Carraway, as though this was a religion of disciplined self-improvement, reminiscent of later health, wealth and prosperity preachers. The only religion that emerges is a kind of pure, muscular, godless Pelagianism.
If there is a God in The Great Gatsby, the only candidate is the all-seeing billboard in the ash-grey landscape where the Wilsons live. It features the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg on an enormous billboard advertising spectacles. The image is creepy and unsettling, and the fact that several characters seem disturbed by these eyes renders the billboard significant in the novel. The eyes seem to watch the characters and see through to their vices. Yet all the billboard does is half-convict the characters: it does not convert or change anyone. Fitzgerald vividly describes the eyes in several places in the novel, but they are faceless and devoid of empathy or compassion.
These eyes feature on the original and striking cover of Fitzgerald’s book. The dust jacket was designed by Francis Cugat (a Catalan-born illustrator), whose family had moved to Cuba in 1903 and then later to the USA, settling in Chicago and New York. The illustration’s Hispanic feel is a nod towards Dali and Picasso. We are given a disembodied face, with unpitying eyes with hints of sadness and melancholy.
Some observers go further, and discern a mildly occultist sense to the jacket cover; a one-off tarot card, perhaps? To be sure, Francis Cugat had plenty of personal experience to draw on in giving us this haunting image. Cugat was immersed in early jazz’s lush and opulent club and music scene. His younger brother, Xavier, was a band leader and often played at the grand hotels of New York City and Chicago, where you could rub shoulders with mobsters, politicians, businessmen and bootleggers. Between the two of them, they would have been utterly at home in the world of Jay Gatsby. This is Made in Essex meets Peaky Blinders.
The eyes of Eckleburg seem to float on an unpromising blue-grey ash background. The red lips are full, yet small, and the face behind these features, one supposes, is somewhat genderless. The eyes stare at the reader before the book can even be opened. They hover above a kind of Coney Island fairground – gaudy and colourful, but also full of cheap prizes and distracting thrills. In other words, almost worthless.
This is perhaps what Foucault might have termed the ‘panopticon gaze’: a silent, unknown overseer in the society in which Fitzgerald sets his novel. For Foucault, this panopticon gaze meant any form of government that could subconsciously control the aspects of our lives. The panopticon gaze of Eckleburg’s eyes symbolises the searing transparency of a world where idle rulers can look down on others yet not lift a finger to help. They can see exactly what is going on. Yet these eyes – all-seeing as they are – are utterly indifferent to truth, the abuse of power or human compassion. The eyes are un-kind and un-caring. That is their point. The eyebrows suggest an expressive frown. We are not meant to approve of what we are about to read and encounter in the novel. Only sadness and fate await.
I’m sure this is deliberate. With Eckleburg’s eyes, Fitzgerald might well be saying something like this: ‘God may well see everything – but he does not care enough to get involved’. All these characters are on their own, and they reap what they sow. The novel seems to say to the characters and the reader, ‘Your shame is your own shit: deal with it’. The eyes that range over the novel’s plot are not so much of God, as they are of some shady guilt, deceits, fatalism, secularism, consumerism and agnosticism.
The lack of moral agency in the novel continues to surprise the reader at almost every turn. Added to this, the novel sets other hares off running around throughout the story. There is a lot of truly awful driving, casual domestic violence, mental instability, excessive drinking, abrogation of any sense of social responsibility, and an absence of empathy and compassion. By the close of the novel, we are left tired of these people and their futility and emptiness.
We are not meant to like them. In real life, I don’t think Fitzgerald did either. Like some reality TV stars of today, their lives fascinate and repel, but they seldom endear. The very point of reality TV is its utter shallowness – a virtual doll house. Some programmes like Schitts Creek play on this with ironic comedy. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,on the other hand, confounds us with its depth, empathy, compassion and absorbing receptive pedagogy.
To be sure, Gatsby does not give us people who are embodiments of evil, per se. That is its genius. But apart from Carraway, they are essentially un-kind folk – they are just a little bit bad by degrees and simply don’t seem to know how to be good. For example, Gatsby has many fine qualities, and he can be gentle and considerate. But his obsessive, possessive love and desire for Daisy suffocates his potential for kindness towards others. His acquisition occludes his moral judgement and emotional intelligence. The novel has no real space for carers of any kind; and it seems to marginalise and mute the kindness of those who might care, such as Carraway.
Indeed, apart from Carraway, it is hard to name any character who displays what we now term ‘emotional intelligence’. Consumption consumes them; self-absorption eats away at them from the inside. The characters nearly all melt away as transitory people who came, saw, spent and went.
Other novel features still trouble this reader some 40 years after first reading it. I am shocked by the undertones of anti-Semitism and the lack of any colour or racial consciousness. The utter emptiness of most of the characters’ lives and the filling of this void by alcohol, spending, material acquisition, climbing the social ladder and craving social acceptance seem cravenly pointless. Class and new money re-emerge as central motifs for understanding the characters.
The Jazz Age is past, and this is our time. Kerouac, whom we mentioned earlier, wrote poetry that was in part shaped by his immersion in Buddhism and jazz. He once wrote of himself as ‘a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jazz session on Sunday’. Like a kind of Miles Davis or a Johnny Coltrane, many of Kerouac’s poems follow a free-flowing, uninhibited prose style: jazz-in-words, if you like. That spirit of jazz pervades much of Fitzgerald’s work.
Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues was a collection of published poems made up of 242 choruses following the rhythms of jazz. In much of this poetry, Kerouac made use of the long dash in place of a period to achieve this jazz-like rhythm. Indeed, just as jazz is often best understood and appreciated as the spaces and the silences between the notes, so is Kerouac. Here we see this in the 113th Chorus:
Everything
Is Ignorant of its own emptiness—
Anger
Doesn’t like to be reminded of fits—
Those lines alone could almost be an epitaph for most of the characters in The Great Gatsby. The amorality of Gatsby is played out in a series of hedonistic episodes which eventually implode into the ash-grey landscape presided over by the all-seeing but un-caring eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The novel ends in a kind of perpetual Ash Wednesday, where sins of omission, of intention and of culpable neglect all come to reify themselves in a bleakness and tragedy that is devoid of kindness, caring and compassion. Shame is unresolved, and these sins of the past stick to the characters as though they were their shadow, and cannot be evaded. That’s why the end of the novel is as haunting now as it was a century ago:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . .
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
What did Fitzgerald mean by this? The word ‘orgastic’ is a portmanteau term coined by Fitzgerald. It carries within it all the overtones implied, not least the momentary personal pleasures and self-gratification that consume virtually all the characters in the book, as they make little effort to ensure that others are satisfied ahead of their desires and needs being sated. The past that is gone cannot be retrieved, and the yearning for personal fulfilment eludes us – and some may say it is an illusion. Gatsby did not retrieve his first love.
Nor did Fitzgerald. And so we ‘beat on’, says Fitzgerald – not letting us know whether this a slow march through Ash Wednesday to somewhere brighter or the beat of jazz that continues to flow long after we have ceased to exist. ‘Everything flows’, said Heraclitus, ‘nothing stands still’ – words from 501 bce that still resonate with us in the twenty-first century.
The beat flows on in Kanye West’s Jesus Walks (2004), an explosive Hip-Hop musical march, that splices together protest, Christian consciousness and the threatening sound of a cultural and political revolution. The beat we hear today is rather different – it is one that rebels against the status quo. Fitzgerald gives a laconic novel; an elegy of disenchantment, tinged with revulsion for the prevailing consumptive materialism of his day. Our time may now demand far more than mere disenchantment. We must beat on to a better future for all.
Yet, for all its atmospheric ambience, I think Gatsby is a story for our age. Especially in a world still coming to terms with a global pandemic, the presidency of Donald Trump, and wars in Europe and the Middle East. (Indeed, Gatsby has enormous resonance with Trump’s world). Put that against a precarious economy, climate crisis, the speed of decline in religious observance and the collapse of established deference, and the 2020s start to look like a replay of the 1920s. Gatsby is the stuff of ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust. The American dream has inbuilt mortality. It will die. All empires and dynasties do. So will I and so will you. What we yearn for is often not life-giving. Only God is eternal. Just as the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg look down on the characters in the ash-grey landscape of Gatsby, the eyes of God are on us too. They see it all.
So, some may still ask, ‘Where is God in Gatsby?’ Nowhere and everywhere is the answer, I think. In some respects, the excessive opulence of Daisy’s world is set up as a deliberate contrast to the grasping misery of Myrtle’s poverty. Gatsby is an apophatic novel – God is not to be found in either emptiness or fullness, consumption or poverty. The characters are all grasping for material comfort, yet all the while knowing that nothing can address the hollowness and meaninglessness of their lives.
Only Nick Carraway in the novel seems genuinely engaged in excavating the potential for kindness, goodness and decency in each character. Carraway is a kind of humanist-spiritual character, but he declines religion like the others in the novel. Thus, that orgastic future we might crave is but dust compared to those transfiguring powers of love, compassion and forgiveness found in redemption. Gatsby dwells upon the poverty of our nature. But the riches of grace must be found elsewhere.
Martyn Percy’s Faith in Secular Life: Implicit Religion and Sublimated Spirituality will be published by James Clarke & Co. in 2026. The author is grateful to Professor Nick Groom at the University of Macau for his invitation to lead a postgraduate seminar and lecture for the Department of English Literature on God and Gatsby at their campus in October 2024. Stephen Morgan (ed.), Sacred and the Everyday: Contemporary Approaches to Literature – Religious and Secular (Macao: Orientis Aura Publications, University of Saint Joseph, 2021) also provided fertile food for thought. See especially the discussion from Shi Xiaoli, ‘Cordelia’s Love and the Sustainability of Familial and Social Elderly Care in China’ (pp. 103-14) on what Shakespeare’s King Lear teaches us about the ageing and infirmity process for parents in relation to their adult children. See also Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Polity, 2021), Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion (London: Picador, 2024); and Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy (London: Allen Lane, 2020), and on democracy undermined in Autocracy Inc. (London: Allen Lane, 2024).