At the height of the Roaring Twenties, a mysterious figure appears on Long Island. Always in the shadows, she watches only one thing: a green light on a faraway boat dock, gently flashing, and calling her back to her past and the love still waiting...
[3/29/24 Author's Note: Contains anti-Semitic language used by Tom. Also, updated this chapter today. I may do minor updates if I find this in others. Because I've read the original book many times, I've struggled not to reflexively default to the details in the book: Gatsby is male, and Karina's name is Daisy. If I missed any, or used male pronouns for Karina, my apologies!]
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Gatsby's car
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Buchanan's car
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The advice my father had given me about judging others now seemed quaint, although well-intended. I was caught up in a world of wealth and excess and competing passions and people so rich and so beautiful but yet so bored. None of us started out with the goal of being rich, drunk, and unable to love. No, the generation of the 1920s -- the "lost generation" -- did all of this to itself. But what do you expect when a country sends its young men to trenches to sit in the freezing rain with rotting dead companions next to them and the threat of mustard gas always on your mind?
Incredibly, most of us who served in the war came back, hugged our families, and went to work. But a not-insignificant number came back damaged, twisted in a way that wasn't visible to others. For them, raucous parties and nonstop drinking helped with coping. Very few people realize that to veterans, jazz was a glorious noise that quelled the voices in our heads.
It is truly amazing that none of these shattered men came back and couldn't turn off the reflex for violence that the war instilled in one's mind. I never personally heard of a veteran losing control and letting their rage run free. Instead, be they farmers or CEOs, they were decent human beings wrestling with something that society buried in shame and that they couldn't discuss.
That was the 1920s. Little did we know what September 1929 would bring -- bread lines, starvation, displacement, even American refugees headed to California and Chicago.
But the war, as cataclysmic as it was, can't be blamed for the way my generation is. We walked into adulthood in a country experiencing a remarkable intersection of historical trends -- the rise of the automobile, the migration to cities, and above all, God's greatest gift: the stock market. Once the armistice was signed, the market exploded, not only in wealth and size, but in the seeming randomness of its movements. Companies, and people, were made and broken by the hour.
