"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 had 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 to the last and greatest of 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 no desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

-The Great Gatsby

'No one ever captured the promise of American life more beautifully than Fitzgerald did in that passage. That sense of America is expressed so completely-by billboards, by our movies, by Chuck Berry's refusal to put the slightest irony into "Back in the U.S.A.," by the way we try to live our lives-that we hardly know how to talk about the resentment and fear that lie beneath the promise. To be an American is to feel the promise as a birthright, and to feel alone and haunted when the promise fails. No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.

Within that failure is a very different America; it is an America of desolation, desolate because it is felt to be out of place...' -Mystery Train