From 20 to 30

“’No…I just remembered that today’s my birthday.’

I was thirty.  Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupe with him and started for Long Island.  Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead.  Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.  Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.  But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.  As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.” (135-136)

 

I find this passage tragically beautiful because it essentially demonstrates the inevitable end to the glamour and the impossibility of Daisy and Gatsby’s romance.  This scene takes place right after the big fight scene between Tom and Gatsby, and once Gatsby and Daisy have left, Jordan, Tom, and Nick are left silently soaking in the events that had just taken place before them.  Reflecting on the fight is somewhat sobering to Nick, and he is suddenly pulled from his state of wonderment of the follies of the Easterners around him when he realizes that it is his birthday.

However, no one wishes Nick a happy birthday, and the statement becomes a rather sad, stand-alone fact.  Even Nick himself describes turning thirty as “menacing”, because he is reluctant to end the fun of his 20s. Therefore, it is significant that Nick turned 30 rather than some other year because the transition from his 20s to 30s symbolizes the inevitable end of the youthful follies of the 1920s. All the easterners cling to their youth with a tight grip and forever strive to achieve the high of living fast and carelessly.  To them, the passage of time is a disdainful inconvenience.  But after this fight scene, each character is met with the ugly reality of their follies, and they are forced to retreat back into the comfort of their wealth.  For example, after Daisy’s affair with Gatsby turns serious and Gatsby expresses to Daisy his expectations for her to live with him, Daisy runs back to Tom because of the safety of his stability.  The description of Daisy’s dreams (and implicitly, her past romance with Gatsby) as “well-forgotten” mark the end of Daisy and Gatsby’s romance.   

Also, with the aid of Jordan’s comforting touch, Nick is able to accept his age and the end of his follies.  His new appreciation for wisdom and stability is demonstrated in his contrast of Jordan to Daisy when he says that Jordan “was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.”  It is at this point where Nick becomes truly disillusioned with his friends and begins to separate himself from them, resulting in his break up with Jordan and his move out of the city at the end of the book.  Because although Gatsby and Jordan and Tom and Daisy will forever chase the highs of the 1920s, Nick is able to accept that he is 30, and his time under the yellow “city lights” of Long Island has expired.