Let me finish tonight with this.
I want to pay tribute to those who remain baffled by this election. I want to give them the compassion I would want myself were I among the dispossessed and now forlorn.
I was thinking today of the last lines from my favorite novel, The Great Gatsby. It is, at heart, the story of a successful man who wants more than anything what his money can’t buy. He wants to go back to the world of his earlier youth, when he was in love and his love loved him. He wants back what he had when he had nothing else.
Here’s the great Fitzgerald:
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 our arms further…And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Chris Matthews