Heightscast

In the opening paragraph of his Confessions, St. Augustine writes, “our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”  For many, the first half of this famous line is a well-known feeling; it is, in many ways, “the feeling of actual life,” to put it in Hemingway’s own terms. Indeed, there lives deep down a desire in all of our hearts for some mysterious reality — a green light across the bay — which seems to forever escape our grasp. Many are dreamers; fewer have found an object worthy of the greatness of their yearning.  What do we do about a situation such as this? And what, if anything, can modern literature do to help us? This week, we sit down with Mike Ortiz to discuss one of the Upper School’s new courses in the English Department. The course we discuss considers two men who, though both great American authors of the first half of the twentieth century, differed greatly in both their lifestyles and their styles of writing.  The authors are the effervescent and romantic F. Scott Fitzgerald and the macho,