No time to establish an expansive tone, you guys: someone has produced a new “intermediate”-level edition of The Great Gatsby for use in high schools. The Macmillan Reader Gatsby uses a manageable 1,600 words—although it repeats some of them—and it does not include Fitzgerald’s original ending, which goes:
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.
Pretty good, right? But not nearly as appropriate for a high school student as Margaret Tarner’s version:
Gatsby had believed in his dream. He had followed it and nearly made it come true. Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us. Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby’s dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn’t he?
Don’t put it into words. Focus your hate through the nearest lens available: your eyes. Look at the picture of Chuck Grassley (R–IA) above until your whole life aligns itself behind a single point: it’s Friday. And this country has got to stop retarding itself.
