America. Группа авторов

      In the car, we listen to Elysian Fields. In 2000, in another time and in another world, before September 11, 2001, this rock band from Brooklyn wrote dreamy, cool songs for an ethereal voice. One song, called “Bayonne,” seems oceans away from my own birthplace, better known for its bawdy festive songs.

      The illuminated skyline of Manhattan rises slowly before us, along the winding roads we take to leave the port. There is nowhere else in the United States where I have felt so intensely the sensation of being “on the edge.” Not exactly at the margins, because the people from Bayonne are neither poor nor disadvantaged, even if it seems they are inclined to be melancholic. But they are from the other side, the opposite shore, not even in the suburbs. They are at the end of the world, although the world is right in front of them. They make me think of the global destiny of all Earthlings: spinning around on a planet situated on the edge of the Milky Way—a luminous spiral that leaves us so far away on the outskirts that we see it as a ribbon—stuck on its shining periphery, far from the center.