Winner of the First Annual Symphonos Senior Essay Contest

This year, Pacifica inaugurated the σύμφωνος essay, the capstone essay of our Senior English Literature program.

The Greek word σύμφωνος (symphonos) describes sounds or voices that agree—sounds brought into harmony. It is formed from the prefix σύν (syn-), meaning “together,” and φωνή (phonē), meaning “voice” or “sound.”

Great literature sounds together. Across vastly different cultures, languages, and historical moments, human voices explore the same enduring dimensions of the human condition: the relationship between language and artistic craft; the mysterious connection between the inner workings of the heart and our embodied, social lives; and the place of the everyday within the eternal.

With this vision in mind, the final essay asks each senior to bring three texts from their Pacifica education into conversation within a single, harmonious essay centered on one word. Each student selects that word—which becomes the essay’s title—as well as the three texts through which it will be explored. 

This year, the Senior English teacher selected a shortlist of four outstanding essays. The essays were then anonymized and submitted to the full English Department for consideration.

We are pleased to announce Samantha Shea as the winner of the inaugural σύμφωνος Essay for the 2025–2026 school year. Her winning essay, “Time,” brings The Great Gatsby, Our Town, and T.S. Eliot’s the Four Quartets, into conversation.

Time
Ms. Samantha Shea ‘26

It is a constant struggle to truly value the present time in one’s life. Although time shapes every part of human life, people still misunderstand their relationship to it. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Our Town by Thornton Wilder, and the Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, time is either misconceived or meditated on. In The Great Gatsby, time is viewed as an experience one could regain and, in Our Town, people are unaware of it until it slips away. In the Four Quartets, Eliot tries to solve these misconceptions about time by showing how human beings become trapped in memory, distraction, and imagined possibility. Together, these works prove that human suffering does not stem from time itself, but from misunderstanding one’s relationship to it.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald lays out time as something that Gatsby believes he can reclaim, and this misconception of time leads to his suffering. Gatsby’s entire life is built around recovering his past relationship with Daisy. His wealth, house, and public image are merely made up to restore what he believes time took from him, saying, “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before” (ch. 6). Gatsby does not want Daisy as she is in the present, but rather not touched by time as she was in the past. This becomes clear when Nick tells him, “You can’t repeat the past,” to which Gatsby responds, “Why of course you can!” Gatsby’s response shows his complete misunderstanding of time. Furthermore, Gatsby seems to be trapped by making Daisy an idea rather than a person. At the end of the book, Gatsby dies still waiting for Daisy’s call, still trying to restore the past. His life ends in this suffering of not accepting reality, but still trying to recover the past. Fitzgerald broadens this to all humanity’s struggle when Nick says humans are “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Human beings move forward in time, but are constantly pulled back by their memory and the possibility of what “could be.” Gatsby’s suffering comes from his failure to let the past stay in the past. While Gatsby suffers because he is trapped in the past, Our Town plays out the failure to realize time’s value while living in it. Wilder focuses on the ordinary life in Grover’s Corners, one of breakfast, school, chores, and simple family conversations. While Gatsby’s world is of parties and fantasy, Wilder’s story is a simple daily routine. The misconception in Our Town is people’s blindness to present time, as they live through meaningful moments without realizing their actual value. This is clear to Emily when she revisits her twelfth birthday after having died. Watching her family during an ordinary morning, all of the sudden she recognizes the beauty of those small moments and asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” Unlike Gatsby, Emily doesn’t try to reclaim the past, but she realizes too late how valuable the present was. Like Gatsby, the people of Grover’s Corners misunderstand time, but in the opposite way. Gatsby suffers by dwelling too much on what is gone, whereas Emily suffers because she failed to see what was there while she had it.

In the Four Quartets, Eliot shows why both Gatsby and Emily misunderstand time. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby treats the past like something separate from the present which, if he works hard enough, he can return to. Eliot confronts that idea in Burnt Norton when he writes, “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/ And time future contained in time past.” Instead of separating time into clear parts, Eliot connects them. This specifically confronts Gatsby as his whole life depends on viewing the past as something lost that can be recovered. Instead, Eliot suggests that the past is not something to chase because it is already a part of time’s larger whole. Eliot makes this even more clear when he describes “what might have been” as “an abstraction/ Remaining a perpetual possibility/ Only in a world of speculation.” Gatsby builds his life around “what might have been,” but Eliot makes it clear that those possibilities are only speculative fantasies. Gatsby suffers because he mistakes those abstractions for reality and dies still chasing them. Furthermore, Eliot connects to Our Town through the idea of wasted time. Simon Stimson says people ‘spend and waste time as though [they] had a million years,’ and Eliot similarly writes of ‘the waste of sad time/ Stretching before and after.’ Both writers show how people misuse time by wasting it or imagining they have more of it than they do. Eliot’s words “distracted from distraction by distraction” sheds light on Gatsby’s parties and the routines of Grover’s Corners, as they fill their lives with distractions instead of understanding the time they are living in. Throughout the Four Quartets, Eliot points out that Gatbsy and Emily’s suffering is due to their lack of understanding time as it actually is.

The nuances in the Four Quartets complicate both The Great Gatsby and Our Town by questioning whether their suffering actually comes from misunderstanding time entirely. In Our Town, Emily believes the tragedy of life is that people fail to appreciate it while living it, but Eliot complicates that idea in Burnt Norton when he writes that, “to be conscious is not to be in time.” This creates tension with Emily’s realization because it suggests that full awareness may actually take someone out of life rather than deeper into it. Emily regrets that she was not conscious enough while living, but Eliot suggests that her ordinary life may not have been entirely wrong. Eliot strengthens this tension in East Coker when he writes, “In order to arrive at what you do not know/ You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.” This directly connects to Simon Stimson’s description of life as moving ‘about in a cloud of ignorance.’ While Simon and Emily treat this ignorance as tragic, Eliot suggests it may actually be necessary. Human beings may have to live without full understanding in order to truly live in time at all. This complicates Wilder’s judgment of ordinary life, suggesting the town’s ignorance may not be failure, but part of the human condition. Gatsby, however, cannot accept this kind of ignorance. Instead of living within uncertainty, he tries to force certainty onto the past by rebuilding it through Daisy. Eliot shows that both responses create suffering, either through regret or obsession. Further, Eliot also critiques the human condition itself, describing people as being ‘filled with fancies and empty of meaning,’ which describes Gatsby’s empty parties and pursuit of Daisy, and even the ordinary routines of Grover’s Corners. Similarly, Eliot’s description of ‘men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind/ That blows before and after time’ proves that human beings are spun by past and future, unable to remain fully in the present, which connect directly to Simon Stimson’s idea of wasting time and to Gatsby’s wasted life of illusion.

Together, The Great Gatsby, Our Town, and the Four Quartets show that time itself is not what causes suffering, but the way people misunderstand it. Gatsby’s life shows what happens when someone lives in ‘what might have been,’ turning possibility into something he believes is real and dying still trapped in it. Emily’s experience shows a different problem, one where she understands life, but only after it is gone, which makes that understanding useless while she is living. Eliot challenges both of these by showing that imagined possibilities are only abstractions and that time cannot be controlled or recovered. Instead, people either resist time, like Gatsby, or only recognize it too late, like Emily. Both responses lead to suffering, and Eliot suggests that the issue is not time itself, but the fact that people try to escape it or fully understand it when they cannot. Together, these books reveal that the real human struggle is not against time itself, but in the way people, with Eliot’s “time-ridden faces,” are constantly pulled between past and future, trying to escape the reality of time instead of accepting it.