Our great and secret fear...

Adam said, "Our great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon, rather than a civilization. Hence, in part, the scale, the insistence, the need to prove the great mysteries obsolete or serviceable. We want our lust to be loved and called beautiful. To receive the homage due to love."

What a British author has an American say to his Australian wife in Shirley Hazzard's 1980 novel The Transit of Venus.