A glimpse of Gatsby's fantasy

Some time ago, I read this book by Scott Fitzgerald called "The Great Gatsby"... I was enchanted at once by the unique, romantic and secretive nature of the main character. For me, Gatsby represented something that I thought to be impossible by then: The incarnation of dreams.

A green light ... That little green light in the end of Daisy's dock has turned into a symbol for every impossible dream, a token for every kind of strange and extravagant utopia. Is there someone brave enough to stand across this light, counting the hours, the days and the years, longing for the moment when he'll finally grasp

the unearthly glimpse? Is anyone romantic enough so as to build a whole life on the broken remaining of a far forgotten dream? Who could possibly sacrifice his entire world without hesitation just to experience some seconds of the illusion of his vision? Jay Gatsby. The man who would do a n y t h i n g for the sake of love. The man who preferred to shut his eyes to reality and fall behind a phantom - just like a child who seeks to find fairies hiding under the leafs.

He wants to repeat the past. Can someone repeat the past? Why would somebody want to go back? When he is happy? I doubt that, since when you are happy all you want is to make the moment last longer. But what happens if you are sad? If you feel like you made an enormous mistake once? Then you do want to go back and change the wrong decision. Gatsby had a really good reason for wanting to go back. Has was being crushed by the weight of his own mistake. In his delusion of grandeur he thought that love could wait for him to fulfil his ambitions. He was poor; he thought he was not appropriate for Daisy, so he did everything he could to become someone worthy of standing by her side. But by then, Daisy was gone.

When Jay said that one can repeat the past, he forgot a very essential detail. He was ready to go back. But Daisy was not. She was not the girl he met on Louisville during the World War I anymore. In all those years, she had become a wife and a mother. She had gained some memories and she had a life. For Jay, running away with Daisy was not enough. He wanted to delete all her memories without him. And she just couldn’t or wouldn’t do it.

A friend once told me something I think I‘ll never forget. We were having a conversation over the whole “time” subject and he told me “I have no idea whether the time is linear or not. But, we all count it in round clocks, right?” That simple statement was a detail I‘ve never noticed before. We do count time in repeated patterns – circles – hours, days, months… they all go back to the first after the last one passes. Could this mean that all human beings have a subconscious desire to turn the time back?

The thing is that in real life, time cannot be reversed. One can only correct his mistakes by planning a new route on the map. The only way of repeating the past is by wondering in our memories.

Before the end of the book, Jay is a hero in the reader’s heart. He fought hard for his dream. Just like a child he refused to accept the truth and he never gave up hope, not even in his very last moments. He died a hero that no one would recognise. He willingly took the blame for everything they charged him with cause all that mattered to him was Daisy. The woman who was too afraid to leave her comfortable life for what her heart wished for and the same beautiful, dissembler and self-centered woman who never called or show any sign of sadness when her dream was no more.

“So we beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past”…

- E.