Aging & Wisdom Quote by Brian Moore

Youth on this boulevard isn’t a demographic fact; it’s a seasonal crop. Moore’s line turns a city street into a kind of customs checkpoint for aspiration, where “faces” replace people and “young” becomes a uniform. The phrasing “as always” does quiet, ruthless work: it suggests a ritual older than any individual, an endlessly repeating scene that makes the observer feel both knowing and faintly helpless. Nothing changes except the faces.

The sentence is engineered as a long, unbroken drift, mirroring the crowd’s flow. “Coming annually” and “endless migration” borrow the language of nature and history, but the destination is pointedly small: they “alight here once,” a brief stop on “the long journey of their lives.” That contrast is the subtext’s sting. The boulevard markets itself as a turning point, yet Moore frames it as a layover, a place that profits from the young’s belief that it’s more than that.

“Every country, every continent” is both grand and flattening. It’s the cosmopolitan boast of a famous street, but also an indictment: the boulevard draws from everywhere because it offers the same package to everyone, regardless of origin. The line carries the novelist’s immigrant sensibility: a sharp eye for how cities convert longing into spectacle, and how youth becomes the renewable resource that keeps the spectacle credible. The faces are young because the dream has to be.