Basically anyone can get the wisdom of something good for you like yoga or the ideas of Buddha. Everyone is allowed, and everyone can access. So it's no great surprise when a writer like Fitzgerald writes a story like Gatsby's, one that 'gets something.' It might sound like a moralizing little tale, like 'don't be greedy, greed is illusion, greed causes others real pain and death,' not unlike the old morality play. But, when you read a story told realistically, it fires neurons and sympathy and understanding deep and common.

And tuned to such, the writer is immersed in the logic of the shapes of life, the courses they take, lives thriving, lives falling, lives taking the middle course.

"There are no second acts in American life," F. Scott sayeth. If you are a writer, and you get it, you want to become little more than who you are, just a wise person, into the Dharma, don't want to make a big show of it, just do the right things and be reverent.

But what happened in Twentieth Century America? Was it ready for accepting a writer's role to transform into a mortal version of Buddha (who was mortal anyway, just like you and I)? Or were there economic demands too pressing to do anything but go on and do it all over again, go down the same mad path of social life and cocktails to come up with another observed and carefully wrought tale?

"So we beat on
boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly
into the past."

One wonders over the ring of it. It's written on his tombstone, by the way (as I've mentioned, a visit last year on Thanksgiving). Can he stop and get out of the stream, or does he have to go back in, pressed into 'his profession.' No resting on laurels, no becoming a simple frugal life of peace removed from unnecessary stuff. Money had something, obviously, to do with it.

And the same with Kerouac. He got it too. Explicitly. He even became the simple sort of holy man, and wrote out scriptures to make them accessible to late 50's U.S.A. But, it seems all the research of his past life of 'getting it' caught up with him, in many ways, the hubris of empire.

One wishes a second life for them. Or a more modest profession to begin with, though maybe it's not their fault that their occupation must be so glorified for them to be able to make a living at it. Maybe, the light of their own work allows more of the possibility, a masterpiece being after all a token of a workman's competence, acceptance into a trade.