My questions are the moment

Never Done: Read the Great Gatsby in a day

Sort of. Not really. But someone did read it to me in a day. And I paid attention. Mostly.

I saw GATZ at the Public Theater -- the Elevator Repair Service's production about a man in an office whose computer won't start, and who picks up a paperback copy of The Great Gatsby and starts to read, at times transforming into Nick Carraway, the novel's narrator. His office mates also morph between being office mates and characters in a reenactment of the novel. The performance was six and a half hours long, with an additional 2 hours in breaks, and trying for someone like me, who does not enjoy being read to.

Is it that I don't enjoy being read to, or is it that my mind has a difficult time focusing, following, and understanding? I discussed this with the women behind me during the breaks. I noticed that if the narrator was reading and nothing else was happening, I pretty much stayed with him. As soon as another theatrical element was introduced -- action, music, sound effect -- my mind was pulled to pay attention to that, and at some point I realized I'd stopped paying attention to the words of the novel. It was easier for me when they dropped into dialogue -- a more traditional stage dramatization. But really, I found my mind wandering so frequently that it became my meta-experience for the theatrical experience, as I started to wonder if I have a significant attention problem, and then chastised myself for not paying attention, and then focused hard on the story -- so hard that I rewarded myself for focusing by telling myself what a good job of focusing I was doing, until I notice that I wasn't focusing anymore ....

By the end of the first half, my head was hurting. Not from a headache, but from trying so hard to pay attention. I ran into a friend of mine during the long break. A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, she is nothing if not rigorous. I asked her if she was seeing GATZ, because I hadn't seen her in the audience, and she said, "No. That's too much theater for me. I know myself too well." As I headed back into the theater for another 3 hours, I thought to myself, "I can only aspire to know myself as well."

One of the women behind me, a smarty-pants with a sarcastic streak, asked me if I'd taken my Ritalin for the second half. Ha ha. She already knows me better than I know myself. I started to feel a little defensive. She (told me that she) had just finished reading the book that morning. I on the other hand, had either never read it, or I read it in high school, which unfortunately amounts to the same thing as my never having read it. (Meanwhile, I live with someone who can literally recite passages from literary works he read in high school, but let's not get into that.) So her experience was maybe like watching an interpretation of a story that was already running in her head, while mine was maybe more like sitting in a dark room while someone read me a novel I had probably never read, while distracting me with typing sounds and pretty shoes. But I stuck with it.

And I was surprised. The second half was easier to pay attention to and more enjoyable. Was it because much of the first half had been set-up, and now the plot was speeding along (so to speak?) (Inside joke for people who remember the plot.) Was it because I had gotten fresh air and dinner? Were the performers more engaged with the material? Did I have something to prove to the woman behind me? Do all my questions like this just serve to distract me from the moment? Are they the moment?

And that's the point when I realized that I do know myself. I might miss what is happening externally, but I am not likely to miss what is happening internally -- so that I go through life sort of like this adaptation of GATZ: part player, part observer, part creator of a hybrid experience. I might not catch that Daisy came from Louisville, but I am going to notice what Daisy's shoes look like, how the sound effects guy works his computer, and why my mind wanders.

And not everyone else in the audience is going to notice all that. And nobody else in the audience is going to have my experience of seeing GATZ.