April 10, 2025 - Good Morning! It’s Thursday, April 10.
On April 10, 1925, a book was published. It made an unremarkable and unsuccessful debut. One hundred years later, this book has sold over 30 million copies, is a staple in most high school English classes, and is widely considered to be on the short list for The Great American Novel. Happy birthday to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
I read it for the first time in the tenth grade, when Jay Gatsby was not yet 50. The themes of the Roaring Twenties, creating your own identity, and achieving the American dream made quite an impression on my impressionable young mind. Over the last 50 years, I’ve reread The Great Gatsby several times, and recently I opened its first page again. But my favorite part is the last page, the haunting, melancholy, beautiful last line - “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Here are some more memorable last lines:
- Lamentations - Turn us back to You, O Lord, and we will be restored. Renew our days as of old.
- Malachi - He shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.
- Psalms - Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord!
- John - Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
- Matthew - Surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.
- Revelation - The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all God’s people. Amen.
Meet you back here tomorrow,
David
cindertex50@yahoo.com
