First Day

Here is where I end up with my students, contemplating this line, parsing its language and the meanings it suggests. Fitzgerald transformed Gatsby's tragic quest for a return to an innocent past into an observation of what it meant to be part of this vast country--suggesting Gatsby's delusion may be ours as well.   

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

It may be a while before I see that line again, as today, my first day unmoored from my world as an Aitkin High School teacher, I begin living it.