When I first read the question, my immediate response was, "Yes, sure..." I was thinking of my beloved wife and sons, the friends and colleagues whom I admire and from whom I learn, the students with whom I feel privileged to interact. For those individuals, for my being able to live with and among them, I feel unreservedly grateful.

But there's a wider context to one's life, isn't there? And somehow the word satisfied just doesn't really work there. For one thing, you can't reach middle-age without coming to a certain realism about how the world works. Not when you've had friends die, both from "natural" causes and by means to which we would never apply that adjective. Not after illness has struck very close within one's family.

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I lack a single passage within scripture or literature with which to define my faith. I'll argue instead that's because the field of possibilities is too rich -- and one might add in the case of literature, ever-growing. I doubt I'm alone in saying my beliefs can be inspired, magnified, by what I read, often in unlikely places.

But shouldn't that make sense? Follow the Jewish and Christian claim that we humans are made in God's image, and we should, occasionally, have the power to reflect glory through our artistic abilities. My ongoing encounter with literature, as with the visual arts (including film) can leave me feeling I've shared vicariously with authors in their uniquely illuminating experiences of the divine.

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"... a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again." That's Nick Carraway describing Jay Gatsby.

Fitzgerald's novel is one I return to year after year. His writing is so sublime that individual sentences still stop me cold in their elegance and I have to read through them again. Even if set in the summer of 1922, "The Great Gatsby" is timeless in its understanding of conflicting responses to the promises offered by America, its call to individual idealism and the possibilities it holds of making a fast buck. We know which of these, when brought into competition, will prevail and how ruthlessly.

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