A Dream Worth Keeping

A vein of gold runs through the American consciousness. Examples: Hurston's Missie May and Joe fall into the trap of a gilded six-bit. Fitzgerald's Dexter Green seeks whatever glitters. O'Neill's Tyrone sells out his talent for money. Amy Lowell's poem "The Captured Goddess" even sees someone following "The spotted gold of tiger-lily petals" (1145). These all speak to the power of gold and money.

And yet...
there are also American voices such as Robert Frost.
"Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay"
(1191).

Maybe the American Dream suffers too much from the human tendency to forget the mutability and mortality of everything. Yet, we still expect the world to remain the place it was in our childhood. We chase after the same happiness, the same colors of dawn, and the same flashes of gold that we have come to expect. When the plain, bright light of day hits us, when fall puts an end to winter's dream, the American Dream crumples along with our expectations. We need to take a page out of the reed's handbook and learn how to bend. Maybe we need to take a time out from the money chase to contemplate a snowy wood somewhere.