Tonight I finished rereading The Great Gatsby. The first time I read this was in high school as a compulsory text, the second time was in my undergraduate degree since it was a book that everyone was ‘supposed to read’, but it is only now, in my third reading, that I’ve finally begun to understand its significance.

Gatsby’s purpose is not simply to find Daisy, which is what the book is built around. His true ambition is far deeper: to regain lost time, opportunities that have come and gone, and to make something of himself worthy of being remembered. Daisy is only a small part of this story. When his dream is obliterated, we lose more than just his life and accomplishments: we lose all the what-ifs, the wishes that never transpired, the regrets that were never amended. The ending is not one of celebration, but of pensiveness. It is a tone fit for an unfinished life, one with more sadness than joy, a possibility that runs in us all.

“And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and 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, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”