和很多人一样，我从很多角度注视过纽约城。荷兰人登陆已像是古老的传说，不过几百年间，无数人从平静的河港或海岸远望过那些面无表情的楼宇，却很难注意到流光溢彩背后汹涌流逝的一切。重读盖茨比的故事，我几次想起Brideshead Revisited，尽管时间、背景全然不同，却都萦绕着无法名状、无可奈何的宿命感。那种旧日不再的孤寂真是刻进了骨头，老帝国与新大陆都无法抗拒这一曲挽歌。
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning ——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
——From Chapter 9, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.