Well you have heard by now Daisy Buchanan's mansion has been torn down due to the price of upkeep. Forty five hundred a day. High price for a literary touchstone. But still, it does seem to fall in with the times and who can forget that green light at the end of Daisy's dock. It is really the heart of Gatsby. The young man who yearns for so much and yet he cannot touch it and there is that green light out in the harbor, a symbol for all that he aspires too and yet can not have.
You cannot read Fitzgerald's early masterpiece of the last century and not think about its relation to where we are now. Gatsby of course wants it all and cannot have it. He is rich but he does not have the girl and so he has nothing. And we have nothing now. We have the fabulously wealthy but the very heart of the American Dream Fitzgerald saw as being corrupted has been fully diseased. Greedy unseen forces did Gatsby iin a much earlier part of our history. The Tom Buchanan's of the world who stood in for the larger world that really held the power and money.
And we have found now that the dream does have a high price. An entire country has suffered of course for the extravagance Gatsby paid for with his life. Certainly this mansion Gatsby saw as having all that life could offer is touching in its demolition because life has lost even the chimera glamour of that old dream. During Fitzgerald's time the American Dream was still being formed, but he saw it's Horatio Algier underside and left the cautionary tale of Gatsby's fate.
So the old mansion is no longer. And I assume the green light at the end of Daisy's dock burned out years before. All we are left with is the novel and the glow of our own fading dreams.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off this summer
You cannot read Fitzgerald's early masterpiece of the last century and not think about its relation to where we are now. Gatsby of course wants it all and cannot have it. He is rich but he does not have the girl and so he has nothing. And we have nothing now. We have the fabulously wealthy but the very heart of the American Dream Fitzgerald saw as being corrupted has been fully diseased. Greedy unseen forces did Gatsby iin a much earlier part of our history. The Tom Buchanan's of the world who stood in for the larger world that really held the power and money.
And we have found now that the dream does have a high price. An entire country has suffered of course for the extravagance Gatsby paid for with his life. Certainly this mansion Gatsby saw as having all that life could offer is touching in its demolition because life has lost even the chimera glamour of that old dream. During Fitzgerald's time the American Dream was still being formed, but he saw it's Horatio Algier underside and left the cautionary tale of Gatsby's fate.
So the old mansion is no longer. And I assume the green light at the end of Daisy's dock burned out years before. All we are left with is the novel and the glow of our own fading dreams.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off this summer
