“El Dorado”, meaning “The City of Gold”, by the American poet, Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849, “mournful and never ending remembrance“), opens:
Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.
The Darker Angels of America’s nature promised the young man that America was a land of limitless horizons and limitless opportunities.
But he grew old -
This knight so bold -
And o’er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
The young man’s satanically inspired hallucinations of eternal youth and unending progress, lured him beyond the coast of California, to Cathay.
And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow -
“Shadow,” said he,
“Where can it be -
This land of Eldorado?”
China did not deliver on its false and misinterpreted promises. But then a spectral chorus of elder American expats-in-China, who knew deep in their damn-ed hearts that they had lost their souls in China, said to the newly arrived fool:
