America, the land of hopes and dreams… or so it is said in the Springsteen lyric.

Time enough for you and I to look around, to consider what your eyes see…

I remember the road trip out west with a friend, when we visited Los Angles, Beverly Hills.  I still remember what I saw.

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I see faces that belong to past generations;
this region is studded
with the images of bold and autocratic human beings.

They have lived and wished to live on:
that is what they are telling me with their houses,
built and adorned to last for centuries
and not for a fleeting hour;
they were well-disposed toward life,
however ill-disposed
they often may have been toward themselves.

I keep seeing

the builders, their eyes
resting on everything near and far that they have built,
and also on the city, the sea,
and the contours of the mountains, and
there is violence and conquest in their eyes.

All this they want to fit into their plan
and ultimately make their possession
by making it part of their plan.

This whole region
is overgrown
with this magnificent,
insatiable selfishness
of the lust for possessions and spoils;
and even
as these people refused to recognize any boundaries in distant lands
and, thirsting for what was new,
placed a new world beside the old one,

each rebelled
against each at home, too,
and found a way to express his superiority
and to lay between himself and his neighbor
his personal infinity.

Each once more conquered his homeland
for himself
by overwhelming it
with his architectural ideas and
refashioning it into a house that was a feast for his eyes.

With the marvelous cunning
of his imagination
he would like to establish all of this anew
at least in thought, and put his hand to it
and his meaning into it

–if only for the moments of a sunny afternoon
when his insatiable and melancholy soul
does feel sated for once,
and only what is his and nothing alien
may appear to his eyes.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 4, Section 291 by Friedrich Nietzsche