This week I stumbled upon a fascinating article from the August 1923 edition of The Atlantic. In “The Literature of Disillusion” Helen Mcafee surveys the fallout of WWI: “The last five years have seen an acute spiritual deflation.”
Before 1918, the American atmosphere was thick with idealism: “I remember hearing one man ask another five years ago [whether Germany would advance to the coast of France]. ‘No,’ was the reply, ‘though I don’t know why I think that—unless it’s what you call Faith.’” However, the post-war landscape had left the hearts of men “a ‘scarred acre’ on which, it seems, the grass will never grow again.”
Just two years after Mcafee’s Atlantic piece, Nick and Jay stumbled out of the Great War and into the pages of The Great Gatsby (1925)—a disillusionment novel par excellence.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald tells it, Americans may have won the war, but they lost hope. Before World War I, America got drunk on faith in humanity. When she returned from the War, she just got drunk.
Hope in Fitzgerald’s world is like a coupé with its wheel shorn off. It will only land us in a ditch; nevertheless, flush with optimism we babble, “No harm in trying.”
WWI revealed the pointlessness of believing in a God like Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. If God is just a set of giant eyes looming over the Valley of Ashes, what good is that? If God is a mere spectator to a world of criminals, adulterers, drunkards, and murderers—a world that slaughters its young men by the millions—what use is he? And doesn’t his inaction make him complicit?
The green light blinking on the first and final pages of Fitzgerald’s novel is a beacon of false hope. Gatsby’s tragedy was that “Gatsby believed in the green light.” Nick concludes with a wry smile: “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . .”
As we experience more and more tragedy and loss, Nick’s cynicism—that fruitless “pressing on” of life—can tighten its grip on us. Life feels hollow, vapid, meaningless. Hope is pointless.
But this is where Mcafee’s article might help us. She surveys contemporary literature of the early 1920s and tries to explain why no great fiction had yet wrestled with WWI head-on. Her conjecture applies to anyone grappling with disillusionment. Could it be that many of us “are still so much under the sway of the overwhelming emotions aroused by” whatever tragic losses we have experienced “that we are not quite open-minded toward their treatment in fiction”?
Mcafee then states, “Art cannot in such a case compete with its raw materials.”
That art, for the Christian, is called faith. Faith is the ability to transcend the scattered raw materials of experience and strive toward belief in a grand cosmic plan. Faith is an act of the imagination, a hopeful piecing together of light and dark. Faith is the daily creativity of clinging to “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).
And yet, when practicing the art of faith, Mcafee’s aphorism still rings true: “An artist . . . must not stand too near his subject.” We struggle to discern God’s story when the wounds are still raw. On those days, hope floats like a pool mattress among yellowed leaves along “its accidental course with its accidental burden.”
But life isn’t a tragic accident—even when it feels that way. Faith is the courage to stand in the midst of a ‘scarred acre’ and mourn the grass that will not grow. However, faith is also the hope that refuses to believe the grass will never grow again.
After a weighty piece like this one, it’s hard to know how to follow with a bit of witty kitchen advice. Perhaps we should just stay on topic and talk about the item in the kitchen that bears the weightiest matter.
Kitchen Scale
Kitchen scales are a dime a dozen, and you can pick a reasonable one up for $15 that will do everything you need. If you are going to get serious about baking, sourdough, or using recipes from across the pond, you’ll want to have one of these handy. I use ours DAILY (I’m not exaggerating), and even though it is super cheap and the ON button is completely worn off and one of the rubber feet is missing, it still gets the job done.
Two requirements: Make sure it has a tare' button and a button to shift units from g to oz.