Ageless
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the ideal feel-good starter read because it talks about how you don’t grow old even as time marches. The whimsical short story is centered on Benjamin Button, who is born at the age of 70 and slowly grows younger in time. As my first foray into Fitzgerald, I was prepared to go into yawn country because of my impression of his other work, The Great Gatsby. Yet, I was pleasantly surprised that this work is more accessible than the author’s other short stories, which I read up for this article, because of its novel plot.
Fans of the recently released film of the same title, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, will find the original story a mere inspiration because the movie dwells more on the glossy romance hampered by time, while the original story explores the amusing implications of a guy who has to dye his hair at the age of five and starts playing football in Harvard at the age of 50.
Painting A Curious Case
The story of Benjamin Button can be found in anthologies of Fitzgerald’s short stories. Yet, the most visually arresting copy recently comes from Harper Collins, which I found in Fully Booked. It is illustrated by children’s book writer and illustrator Calef Brown. It is because Brown’s moody purple and blue hues, together with his playful geometric shapes, communicate the fantasy aspect of the narrative. At the same time, the abstract use of color evokes Button’s story as part of the Jazz Age, when Fitzgerald wrote it, and gives an added vibrant texture to the tale.
The Return Of The Jazz Age
Although written for Collier’s magazine in 1922, the story naturally fits into our present because of how technology has ravaged our concept of time and aging. We have people in their 60s looking like they are in their 20s, thanks to nip, tuck and Belo. On the other end of the age spectrum, we have tweens eager to skip their teen years and fast-forward to maturity, thanks to shows like Gossip Girl and films like Twilight.
As I Googled Fitzgerald, I found out that the excesses of our generation are the excesses of his as well. Eerily, the post World War I youth of the Jazz Age, like the millennial kids, were called the “lost generation” because they, too, lived during the height of overindulgent partying and immoral behavior.
Scott Fitzgerald died from heavy drinking at 44 and his first wife Zelda was mentally unstable — just like celebrities today. Back then, new technologies like the telephone and automobile changed behaviors, just like how Facebook and the iPod have made us into a me-generation. We have even literally borrowed their style as bowler hats, vests and jazz colors like purple are in vogue in this time of recession, just like how the Jazz Age ended with the Great Depression.
Ultimately, the message of Button is not to compare periods or lampoon a generation but to tell readers to act their age and own it. As every seconds ticks, we grow older and we must accept it. Fitzgerald through Benjamin Button shows how aging backwards is more unnatural and difficult. The hero Button is unable to find happiness at the age of five with the mind and body of a 70-year-old because he would rather read the encyclopedia than play with toys. As he grows up, he has a wife whom he dumps at the age of 50 because, as the narrator describes, he “has been devoured already by the eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.”
It becomes harder as Button becomes younger than his son Roscoe who is embarrassed by his father’s fate. With such queer difficulties, Fitzgerald illustrates that it is absurd to go against your age. Thus, the only solution that has been proven effective is simply to grow old gracefully — and there is nothing more beautiful than that.
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Calef Brown’s illustrations can be found at http://calefbrown.com
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E-mail me at readnow@supreme.ph.
