What does this final line of The Great Gatsby mean? That depends on what you want it to mean. You can use this line to support an affirming “life goes on” perspective. Or, if you are an existentialist, you can say that it shows how pointless it is to … Read More
Month: October 2013
“I wandered lonely as a cloud”
This is the opening line of a poem written by the revolutionary William Wordsworth in 1804. He shook things up by experimenting with “real language” (as opposed to the formal style found in serious writing), and he wrote about feelings (as opposed to intellectual matters). This line has stuck with … Read More
“Only the past interests me now.”
Albert Einstein wrote that the separation between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. This idea is at play in Lisa See’s novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. The narrator is an old woman who looks back and concludes that she has waged a … Read More
“Now I become myself.”
Parker Palmer quotes this wonderful opening line from a poem by May Sarton in his collection of autobiographical essays Let Your Life Speak. For him, the process of “becoming” meant taking many wrong turns before finding the right ones. People who know him only as the highly successful best-selling … Read More