"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1926)

Gatsby—the man that he thought the woman he loved thought he was—was mistaken, owing to his not-yet “thinning briefcase of enthusiasm’’ (unlike that of the novel’s narrator), the flourishes of New York, and the insufficiency of his five-months’ overseas education.

The novel reads as a movie script waiting to be animated. The characters engage neither individually nor as a class. They are no class. Foreigners to the East, they are attracted to New York by its conspicuous features, which often are its most superficial ones. The characters' failings point not at a class, but at the lack of due diligence in the era of National newspapers, large-scale frauds, and affordable travel.

Singing on the River

(Trinity College Cambridge, 6 June 2010)

Melancholy shuns neither misery nor comfort. In misery, it inspires despair; in comfort, it inspires beauty. Despair is forgotten, beauty is immortal. He who finds comfort may live on through beauty, in songs centuries old, in voices young and happy.

The White Guard

(The National Theatre, 22 May 2010)

The play lacks character---not just Russian or Ukrainian one, but any. Russian pensiveness is replaced by verbosity. Familial and friendship relationships appear shallow, hence arbitrary. Protagonists have been assigned accents (English, Scottish, Swiss) that do not help delineate the play's geographic or social divisions, if any. Instead of illustrating past concerns that remain relevant today, the production imputes present anxieties to past characters.

The play is a warning against the intoxicating, addictive simplicity of war. The play's civil war is dispensable; it could have been replaced by an election. Even though some wars are indispensable (given the prevailing institutions), the damage inflicted by all wars on witnesses and their descendants has never been fully accounted for when deciding whether to war. The distinction between desertion and voting is blurred.

The Habit of Art

(The National Theatre, 14 May 2010)

The tragedy of being able to speak, having nothing to say, and yet being listened to---it afflicts the play's characters and implicates its playwright. Death, the protagonist, is gradual; it bares life, but does not corrupt it---for the lives of the dying have long been appropriated by the living. Even if others---living or dead---are not what one wishes they were, they deserve credit for being what makes one wish they were what they are not.

"Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Truman Capote (1958)

Open-mindedness enriches routine, in Truman Capote's book. In Blake Edwards's insipid film, mindlessness exaggerates luck. Life's complexity disappoints those exhilarated by cinematic short-cuts. Yet, the disappointed rarely blame movies for their condition.

A theatre production or a movie, made and watched collectively, is designed to synchronously evoke shared emotions---typically, uplifting ones, as individuals seek company in joy and seclusion in grief. The requisite commonality degrades the production of an incapable director. A book, received in solitude, welcomes the nuance, which would wane at a séance.

A good book, too, misrepresents, as no intelligent author of good taste can bear late nights of exploring the mind of an unintelligent protagonist of poor taste. Misrepresentation advances art. Truman Capote's misrepresentations are consistent and intelligent.

Capote captures the essence of the traveller's attitude. Keep moving until you feel at home. ("I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.") Recognise friends in strangers. ("For I was in love with her. Just as I'd once been in love with my mother's elderly coloured cook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named McKendrick.") Be true to a goal. ("That's how your stories sound. As though you'd written them without knowing the end.")

"A Mathematician's Apology" by G.H. Hardy (1940)

In mathematics, there is no political correctness, just correctness. A mistake is unlikely to offend or mislead many and for long. Hardy writes as one states mathematical conjectures: clearly, confidently, irreverently.

Mathematics is a young men's game. Most games are. But the ageing of one's mind need not entail an abrupt withdrawal from creation, and hence from life. Even if having practised mathematics has initiated a now retired mathematician into the beauty that is unmatched in other pursuits, he can still devote the remainder of his life to cultivating beauty in the non-mathematical world. Literature differs from mathematics only in degree, not substance. Flaws in the argument are easier to detect in mathematics. Literature's value resembles that of a mathematical conjecture with a proof sketch: possibly false, definitely incomplete, but inspiring. (Poetry is a conjecture without a proof sketch.)

Hardy denies to pure mathematics any utility other than its aesthetic pleasure, shared with art. Even though once-pure mathematics eventually finds practical applications, these unforeseen applications do not motivate pure mathematicians. Beauty, escapism, and competition do. A beautiful theorem is beautiful in its statement and in its proof, which link simply hitherto disparate ideas. An escape into mathematics is more credible than an escape into art. In art, one invents a world. In mathematics, one dreams of a world and then proves its existence.

The lucid minds who seek inapplicable beauty are not wasted. One would not wish to arrest the mutation of genes just because the natural selection were not forward-looking. Similarly, one should not arrest the work of a pure mathematician just because he is unable to foresee its applications. Insistence on applications will discourage him, instead of convincing him to change his topic or occupation.

"The noblest ambition is that of leaving behind one something of permanent value." Hardy believes that one can leave something of value only by associating one's name with a discovery. But name-recognition is not necessary for immortality. One can contribute to a civilization by enriching the lives of others in trite, anonymous ways, which will enable others to discover.

Hardy derides expositors and critics. Yet, a mathematical proof is the exposition of a theorem's statement. Intuition for a proof is its criticism, which can be viewed unfavourably, as the proof's corruption for the sake of the illusion of understanding, or favourably, as a puzzle explaining some steps in the proof and leaving intermediate steps to the reader. Even if criticism is the work of second-rate minds, it enables third-rate minds glimpse the beauty that would have otherwise been restricted to first-rate minds.

The Glass Menagerie

(Cambridge Arts Theatre, 17 April 2010)

The comfort of resignation is deceptive. The emotionally fragile but sane should not be housed together, in order not to aggravate their condition. The housing prescription must be observed most forcefully in families, where the shared melancholy disposition and the distrust for the outside world lead to the preservation of the streak that otherwise would have either killed or made its lonely bearer stronger---which is the risk worth taking.