I return to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Our April Letter” every Easter. It encourages us to discover the extra that we have.
If a tall, talking, holiday-enthused rabbit were to sidle up to me and inquire as to my thoughts on the meaning of Easter, I would answer by saying, “The next and better act.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously opined that there are no second acts in American lives, which is ironic because Fitzgerald himself excelled in creating additional acts to his own brief life. Having been a commercial success, he was then shunted aside and forgotten, at which point Fitzgerald resurrected himself as an artist and a person, creating a body of work within a body of work far wiser and more human than the tales he’d spun in halcyon times of flouting flappers and gramophone philosophers.
“Our April Letter” is all of 260 words. You can memorize it and recite it as if it were a prayer born of a human rather than God, which I think also gets us to the crux of Easter. The narrator — and I don’t want to say it’s just Fitzgerald — makes mention of all the stories he’s written. It’s many stories, which adds up to a lot of a form of giving, for that’s what telling someone a story is. One person is trying to reach another. To connect with them. And that takes something real and endemic to us that begins on the inside.
That’s Easter and its lifelong challenge right there: Discover the extra that you have. That extra bit of humanness that you didn’t know was there. Mine it and give of it. The next act is more important than the last, and there is always a next act if you cede the entirety of yourself over to the creation of one.
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