“If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…” ~
Every year at around this time the spirit of Gatsby calls to me.
Maybe it’s the spring air, tilting between the wilderness of winter and the first whispers of summer.
Maybe it’s the perfume of lilacs, lilting on the tricky breeze, and ever-threatening to disappear once that breeze turned into a wind.
Maybe it’s the elusive tragedy of almost getting everything you think you want, and almost realizing you may not want it.
Perhaps that’s why Gatsby has always been a hero to me: he never quite gets what he thinks he wants. There’s a nobility in that – a tragic and sorrowful nobility that transcends the roaring fabulousness of his opulent surroundings, hinting at a scrappy past he wants to remain secret, a hungry emptiness that the self-invented often take to the bank. It’s the wanting that is so moving – the desire that finds no easy satisfaction. Some say that’s the same sadness inherent in the American dream, especially for immigrants, and when the vast majority of us are descended of immigrants it’s a sadness that pervades this great American experiment. When the power of individual achievement is realized, when you create yourself from the ashes of the absence of fuel or family or the simple helping hand of another person, you craft a life of loneliness – a solitude that cannot be broken or unbound by love or marriage or the adoration of the entire world.
“His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.” ~
