My family emigrated to the U.S. after the Iranian revolution in 1978.

When we grew up, our family and kind of gaggle of cousins would go to the south of France for the summers. And we just had a grand time.

My family owned a bunch of pharmaceutical manufacturing plants and other consumer-goods manufacturing plants. We would license Western goods and manufacture them in Iran and distribute them throughout the Middle East.

I started in investment banking at Allen & Company in 1991. It was the go-go days of media mergers, and we were incredibly busy with one deal after another. Unlike typical investment banking groups, even in the midst of merger mania, we didn't have a formal face-time culture - and I felt empowered by that.

But there comes a moment when the mood burns out and everything ends. As a matter of reflex, out of custom, we go on repeating the gestures and words and want everything to be the way it was yesterday, but we know already — and the discovery Appalls us — that this yesterday will never again return. We look around and make another discovery: those who were with us have also changed —something has burned out in them, as well, something has been extinguished.

When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of dream?