◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Green Light in The Great Gatsby I want to tell you about the green light. You know the green light. You have always known it even if you have never stood on a dock in the summer darkness and reached toward something across the water that was visible and luminous and absolutely out of reach. You know it because you are American. Because the green light is what America runs on — the belief that the thing across the water is real, that if you want it purely enough and reinvent yourself completely enough you can cross the water, you can touch the light. Gatsby believed that. I believed that. I was not writing about a character so much as writing about a hunger I recognized from the inside — the hunger of the boy from nowhere who has decided he will become someone the world cannot ignore, someone the old money world will finally have to let in. The parties. The shirts. The green light burning at the end of the dock like a promise that tonight might be the night the distance closes. It doesn't close. The green light is not a destination. The green light is a mechanism. It keeps you reaching, keeps you believing that what you have is not enough and what you want is just across the water and the wanting itself is the point. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess they had made. I want you to sit with that sentence in the specific context of the present moment — the smashing up of things and creatures, the retreating into money, the other people left to clean up the mess — and tell me whether it was written in 1925 or yesterday. Tom Buchanan is not a villain. That is what makes him dangerous. He has never had to reckon with the consequences of anything he has done because his money and his carelessness have always insulated him from consequence. He does not think of himself as careless. He thinks of himself as strong. There is a difference between strength and carelessness that you can only see from the position of the people cleaning up the mess. I was destroyed by the dream. The crack-up had a clarity the parties never had — the clarity of a man shown what the dream costs by the fact of having paid it. The self had cracked like a plate — quietly, so that for a long time you didn't know, until one day you picked it up and it fell apart in your hands. That is what the dream does to the people who believe in it most completely. Not to the Tom Buchanans. The Tom Buchanans don't believe in the dream — they own things, they have always owned things. The dream keeps other people reaching and consuming and working while the Tom Buchanans retreat into their vast carelessness. The dream destroys the Gatsbys. The dream destroys the Fitzgeralds. The people who believed it purely enough to sacrifice everything for it. The people who have figured out that you can sell the green light without ever delivering it, that you can throw the party, let the guests pay, and retreat into your money when it ends — those people are not believers in the dream. They are its operators. The believers get destroyed. The operators get rich. America has elected an operator and called it the fulfillment of the dream. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. The green light is real — real as a promise, real as a longing, real as the thing that keeps you reaching on the dock in the summer darkness. What it is not — what it has never been — is a destination. The destination is here. This country. These people. This moment. Not across the water. Here. Where the mess is. Where the reckoning with the careless people is the only work that matters. Beat on. Not toward the green light. Toward each other.