“Here goes nothing”

“Here goes nothing” names the wager of beginning again: not confidence that a new life will succeed, but a willingness to leap without carrying a settled past as protection. Rabo Karabekian places the phrase within his account of leaving San Ignacio for New York City, where a journey across the continent becomes an image of rebirth.

Meaning and Context

The expression appears after Rabo contrasts his departure with his parents’ circumstances. He says that most Americans can go somewhere else to start anew, while he had no supposedly sacred land or shoals of friends and relatives to leave behind. In this setting, “nothing” means both the absence of an inherited attachment and the open possibility of a new beginning. Rabo connects that condition to the United States’ philosophical investment in zero: a person can imagine starting from nothing because there is no fixed past that must be carried forward.

Rabo gives the phrase a physical gesture: the American says it while going off the high diving board. The leap makes uncertainty bodily and immediate. It is not a promise of safety or success, but a moment of commitment in which hesitation gives way to action.

Rabo’s Journey to New York

Rabo’s own departure supplies the expression’s narrative instance. He says he went to New York City to be born again. Crossing the continent in Pullman cars, he describes his mind as blank as an embryo’s and his former home, San Ignacio, as though it had never existed. The language of birth turns geographical relocation into a deliberate break with the life he has left behind.

The journey’s images extend the rebirth metaphor: the Twentieth Century Limited plunges from Chicago into a tunnel beneath New York City, which Rabo likens to passage through a birth canal. Ten minutes later, he says, he was born in Grand Central Station. He arrives in a first suit, carrying a cardboard valise and a portfolio of his best drawings. These concrete possessions qualify the idea of starting from nothing: he leaves behind his old setting, but brings his work and the materials of a possible future.

Narrative Significance

The phrase links an individual act of departure to Rabo’s broader account of American mobility and self-invention. Its casual, almost comic wording sits beside the elaborate birth imagery of the train journey. Together, they frame beginning again as both a national ideal and a vulnerable personal leap: the past can be imagined away, but the traveler still arrives carrying a valise and a portfolio. The expression’s force lies in that tension between nothing and what a person manages to bring along.