THE WONDER OF THE FUTURE (COMMENT). Nick Carraway, before his last reflections on Gatsby’s dream , thinks of the Dutch sailors who first saw Long Island, and of their first glimpse of the American continent. Carraway says: “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.”
Fitzgerald loved Keats, and I have to think that he had these lines in mind:
“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
Happy New Year!
“For I am always and ever awaiting a renaissance of wonder.”
One of the Beat poets
Corso? Ferlinghetti? I used to know.