「Gatsby’s House was still empty when I left—the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mind. One of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident and perhaps he had made a story about it all his own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him when I got off the train.
I spent my Saturday night in New York because these gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter faint and incessant from his garden and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there and saw its light stopped at the front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know the party was over.
On the last night, with my truck packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. The I wondered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardy any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until I became gradually aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailor’s eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, he trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, and once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he either understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
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 his blue lawn and his dream must have seems 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 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 will run faster, stretch out arms farther…And one final morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.」*
The last few pages of the story “The Great Gatsby”, written by a classic author F. S. Fitzgerald, are the best part of it.
Although It’s about the begin and the end of the American dream on the Jazz generation after World War I; however the novel involves persistent love, unavoidable jealousy, necessary hatred, great happiness, twisted fate, and positive attitude after hope diminished that make it a classic lasting work.
So generation after generation, we human live and die and we have no choice but beat on…
*《The Great Gatsby 》, by F. Scot Fitzgerald
2017/12/10 We have no choice but beat on Damakey
