But the experience I had while reading “The Great Gatsby” as an adult was very different. I would argue that this reading was deeper, more emphatically felt. While most young people admire Gatsby’s youthful love for Daisy — for the possibility associated with her economic and social class, and for who he was with Daisy, too, in that shining moment in time — there is much subtext that becomes clearer with age, subtext Fitzgerald must have been acutely aware of when he wrote “The Great Gatsby.”

One of the first great lessons of my adulthood was this: I change. As I grow, my dreams change, as do my ideas about who I can be and what I want during the short time I am alive. Gatsby has not learned this. It is a lesson he has closed himself to. From the moment he meets Daisy, his ideas about who he is and what he wants and what he can become are immutable. It’s ironic that he is so in love with the moment of greatest possibility in his youth, the moment he kissed Daisy, but his love for that moment has rendered all other avenues of possibility impossible, has fossilized him, sealed him in amber, turned him to stone — made it possible for him to see only one version of himself. After years of underhanded dealing and shady business, he is wealthy, popular, feared, respected. On West Egg, he hosts glittering parties where old money and new money engage in raucous revelry together. He owns the newest, most exquisite cars and he has mannerisms and a wardrobe to match his new social station. When we meet Gatsby, he has worked furiously to make himself into the man who, on the surface, high society would have deemed a good match for Daisy. And in the end, this immutability, this blindness to change, the fact that Gatsby can picture himself as only one thing, limits him.

It is almost as if Gatsby’s inability to recognize opportunities for change in himself means he can’t acknowledge change in others either. When he meets Daisy again, he sees only the girl he fell in love with. He cannot understand that she isn’t the same person she was because so much has occurred in her life; she has been married for a number of years, and she has borne a child. The accumulation of days spent shaping herself to her husband and caring in her careless way for her child has changed her from the girl she was. Nick sees this in her, in the way she speaks, with “fluctuating, feverish warmth.” But Gatsby’s love for her girlhood means he can hear only the youth in her voice, and he is deaf to the age in her words. Adults understand this, intrinsically, marked as they are by the years, time wreathing them in layers: an onion growing round and waxy in the earth. Likewise, I think this is why Gatsby underestimates the extent of Tom’s malice, and the perfidy of the social class he has fought to become a part of.

And that, perhaps, was the idea most invisible to me as a young reader: that the very social class that embodied the dream Gatsby wanted for himself was predicated on exclusion. That Gatsby was doomed from the start. He’d been born on the outside; he would die on the outside. Hungry as I was to escape my own little nowhere country town, my own poor beginnings, as a teenager I could see only Gatsby’s yearning. I was too young to know his wanting is wasted from the moment he feels it. The seasoned heart aches for James Gatz, the perpetual child, the arrested romantic, bound by one perfect moment to failure.

This is a book that endures, generation after generation, because every time a reader returns to “The Great Gatsby,” we discover new revelations, new insights, new burning bits of language. Read and bear witness to the story’s permanence, its robust heart. Read and bear witness to Jay Gatsby, who burned bright and bold and doomed as his creator. Read.