Boats against the current - To take on time and fate (The Great Gatsby)

"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now - isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly.
To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be--Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity--to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

[@peterzonis1711]

Beautiful