The Art of Acceptance From “The Great Gatsby”
As I chose to read “The Great Gatsby”, I read with zero expectation, thinking it was just another classic that touches on every other classical book’s main themes; society, injustices, discrimination. Gradually, as I reached the end of the story, I found myself falling in love with Fitzgerald’s closing passage.
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that is no matter, tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Fitzgerald uses beautiful, poignant imagery to convey the deeper complex themes about the condition of humans and the pursuit of dreams. The green light that Gatsby believed in symbolises his dreams, his longing for Daisy Buchanan and the life he imagined with her. Throughout the novel, this green light at the end of Daisy’s dock represents the unreachable ideal that Gatsby strives for. When Fitzgerald writes, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us,” he is highlighting the ephemeral nature of dreams and the fleetingness of aspirations.
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The “orgiastic future” suggests a wild, ecstatic vision of what could be, but one that is constantly slipping away, year by year. Fitzgerald further states the desperation one is willing to take in order to chase a single dream through the phrase “It eluded us then, but that is no matter, tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further”, where it reflects Gatsby’s relentless optimism and determination. Despite setbacks and failures, Gatsby remains hopeful that tomorrow will bring new opportunities, and he will strive even harder to achieve his dreams.
My favourite line from the passage is the concluding sentence, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” It is a poignant reflection on the inevitability of human struggle and the relentless passage of time. It suggests that despite our efforts to move forward and achieve our dreams, we are often thwarted by external forces (the current) and haunted by our memories and past experiences (borne back into the past).
As I exhaled my breath from reading the concluding sentence, I found myself staring at the ceiling in a state of blankness. My mind constantly repeated the line “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” How many of us are unable to make the correct decisions in our life due to the past? How many of us are victims or slaves to remembering the past — tormented by the beliefs that the choices do not matter if they do not involve the past — that putting the past in the present, including in the choices, is the only way to achieve the single dream that we are so fixated on?
Like Gatsby who leaves the world without being remembered despite all those extravagant parties and connections (or so he thought), do we really want to live a life that is based on the past, completely abandoning the unexplored future where things, perhaps, could have been so much better than the present and past? Then, as I am writing this, I said to myself,
“let’s not live a life to reach a single dream made in the past. But let’s live a life to reach the dream in the past that is evolving according to the state of our present now.”
A life should be lived in pursuit of evolving goals that align with the current state of one’s life, rather than being constrained by past desires. Past shall remain a past, it is something that is left by time, left to be remembered by the present and future. Let’s not live a life worshipping the one that has left, but instead focus on the one(s) that are growing, moving, transforming with us.
Ad astra per aspera, Sofea.
