Bertrand Russel writes about obsessive love (in relation to Fitzgerald and Nabokov), and it reminds me of a previous thought I'd had: that no man is complete without some unobtainable love.
Those two authors write mostly about obsessive romantic love (or lust), but their characters stand for far more than mere sexuality (or even humanity). All men and women need an object of desire -- moral, spiritual, philisophical, material? -- to yearn for and strive after, knowing it can never be obtained. This is the essence of tragedy, and the foundation of greatness.
No one accomplishes anything great by aiming at the attainable. Greatness is achieved in incremental steps, to be sure, but the ultimate goal must stand forever out of reach or it's not even worth the effort. Greatness springs from tragedy; tragedy puts the accomplishments of life into scale, and reveals their greatness.
As a banal example, consider the SAT. If everyone received perfect scores, what significance would the test have? It would tell us nothing about anyone's abilities, intelligence, knowledge, or determination. Tragedy serves the same purpose; by highlighting the failures and disappointments of life, success can be elevated to the level of greatness. By striving for impossible goals, through obsession with the unattainable, a man is stretched to his fullest extent and his greatness can be rightly judged.
Well, that's theological, isn't it? Longing for God being a desire that can never be fulfilled. Process is generally more fulfilling than attainment. Perhaps Heaven is eternal revelation of an infinite Being who is never fully revealed.
It touches on certain mathematical views of infinity, too. Of course, infinity out into nowhere, without a reference point, is cold and lonely. I prefer the infinity illustrated by a curve — forever approaching zero (or some number). I think that holds for any two separate entities, whether God/believer or lovers: one can never BE the other person, nor understand her completely, but one can always get closer to doing so.
Tragedy and the SAT - Amen!
hln
You can also throw in the perfect marriage and sainthood. The uphill slopes we can set ourselves against to struggle and do our best can be varied.
TML: Yeah, all those things. That was the beauty of Nabokov to me, the obsessive, unattainable longing. We've all got to feel that sometime, or we're not really human. We've got to stretch ourselves beyond what we have any hope of accomplishing.
Good point. To amplify, it's important to distinguish greatness from virtue; MacBeth was a great man but not a nice man. Gatsby was "Great," as the title says, not because of the means of his pursuit (which were unethical when they weren't criminal) or the goal of it (a spoiled, pretty girl) but the magnitude of his obsession.
This also goes to the thin line between heroism and lunacy. Depending on which side you were on, whether you shared her goals or opposed them, Joan of Arc was a saint or a madwoman.
PG: Absolutely -- greatness and goodness are very different. Even Hitler was "great", in a sense, but he was a terribly evil man. Nabokov's Humbert Humbert wasn't a good man, nor was Gatsby. In fact, being great and good at the same time is probably incredibly hard.