I *hope* you all had a great Thanksgiving! I *dream* that next year you'll be able to fly and explode things with your mind. A girl can dream, right? Speaking of which, what does dream even mean? How does it differ from hope? Well, I'm glad you asked!
Dream--an involuntary vision occurring to a person when awake. (As a verb) To see or imagine in a vision. Also, a vision voluntary indulged in while awake. Key word here being awake.
Hope--(as the verb) to look forward to with desire and reasonable confidence; to place trust, rely; to feel that something desired may happen. (As a noun) The feeling that what is wanted can be had.
I didn't just make this up either; I found this in the dictionary. "So why, Paityn," you're asking yourself, "are you telling us the denotative meanings of dream and hope? Don't you know what break is? How about you look that up?" And then you begin laughing to yourself at that wonderful joke you just made because you're so clever.
Well, I told you this so I can explain why I love Gatsby so much. It takes a lot of courage to hope for something and hardly any at all to dream. I'm scared to tell people of my hopes because what if they don't happen? What if I can't reach them? It's terrifying, but we all know how to "dream big." Anyone can want something they'll never have, but not everyone is brave enough to live their entire life in the *hope* that something will happen. One of my biggest hopes is that I won't get stuck here. In America. There are a thousand places to go and see, and I will not allow myself to be anchored. I believe with a reasonable confidence this will happen. I can't think it won't. I just can't. One of my biggest dreams is to go to space. I understand that it will probably never happen, but I still want to. If I was on a space engineering team, maybe I would hope to go to space, but until then, it's just a dream. You see the difference?
Gatsby hoped so much. He hoped in an unabashed, innocent way. The way a child hopes for Christmas; the way an army brat hopes their parent will come home; the way a lost child hopes they'll be found. It's an all consuming hope, so much that you can't imagine it won't happen. There is no way. You have to be extremely brave to hope and work and strive for something so out of your control. You have to be insane to base your life on something that you can only hope for. Gatsby may have done a lot of shady things, he may have had a good deal of secrets, but he was brave, in it, he hoped for more. I understand why a lot of people may not like Gatsby, but he was my favorite character. He was hope itself in every definition of it. What's your biggest hope? You don't have to tell me, just think about it. Don't think about how absurd or scary or unlikely it may seem, just what is it? Now, think about you never being able to do it; you never being able to succeed. Scary, right? You have to be brave to embrace it anyway and go for it. I'm not asking you to become a bootlegger to make all your dreams come true, but imagine how Gatsby felt, faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles and all he could do was hope for the best. So he did. And maybe that's the most important part.
Okay, just so no one says, "Well look where that got him. Did you even finish the book?"
I understand that "...he must have felt that he had lost the warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream" (pg 161). Also notice how he said "dream." I'm not going to analyze when Daisy switched from a hope to a dream, but it's not that he died, or how he died or why he died or anything. It's that he hoped so much with so little of a chance for return, but he did so anyway. And that's one of the bravest things I can imagine.
You know that quote from Spongebob with the shriveled up fish that says she hates chocolate?
ReplyDeleteThat's how I felt about this one.
I don't believe hoping ever got anyone anywhere. I think you use hope incorrectly here. You don't have to be brave to hope. In fact I think you need courage to dream, and to achieve that dream. You can hope that it's easier than you originally thought to get there, and you can hope you have the strength to do it, but you need to decide that no matter how far-fetched your dream is, you will someday make it. If going to space is your dream, you need to do everything in your power to go to space. You can't just hope that someday it works out.
A big part of my argument here is also that dreams are more powerful than hope. Hope is like luck. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don't. I highly disagree with President Snow's quote that hope is stronger than fear. The ability to dream is stronger than fear. To know that you have the opportunity to accomplish great things if you take that first step can beat the fear of failure. If you hope...you'll find yourself hoping for better all the time, and you'll really, if you refer to the sort of poem I posted a couple weeks back, find yourself looking at the gash in the earth hoping it closes.
Really, hope is more of an ineffective action taken towards a dream. It has the potential to become determination, but hope and determination are not synonyms. It's like the evolution of Magicarp (or however you spell it) to Girardos (or however you spell it, I don't play Pokemon I've just heard that reference).