I recently read Joan Didion's Where I Was From. It was great! I'd read and listened to a few of her books before and was particularly interested in this one as I knew it was about her life in, and perspective on, California, as both a place and ideal. The book was a series of essays and despite being published in 1999, it still seemed relevant today, exploring the population explosion of the state in Didion's lifetime (she was born in 1934), the decline of jobs and industry in Los Angeles in the late '80s and early '90s, the state's struggle to maintain a strong middle class, the significance of westward migration to the state in the nineteenth century, and the natural challenges the state presented then and presents now. Didion is brilliant and deep and while I don't re-read books often, this one seems like a wise one to return to when I crave deeper analysis on this unique and beautiful place. Below are my photos and several brief passages I enjoyed in the book.
"Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another. The separation, of north from south -- and even more acutely of west from east, of the urban coast and the valleys from the mountain and desert regions."
"Scaled against Yosemite, or against the view through the Gate of the Pacific trembling on its tectonic plates, the slightest shift of which could and with some regularity did destroy the works of man in a millisecond, all human beings were of course but as worms, their "heroic imperatives" finally futile, their philosophical inquiries vain."
"Californians of more programmatic mind for many years presented these postwar changes as positive, the very genius of the place: it was conventional to mention the freeway system, the aerospace industry, the University of California Master Plan, Silicon Valley, the massive rearrangement of the water that got funded when Pat Brown was governor [...] The more recent programmatic attitude was to construe the same changes as negative, false promises: the freeways had encouraged sprawl, the aerospace industry had gone away, the University of California had lost faculty and classrooms to budget cuts, Silicon Valley had put housing beyond the means of non-tech California, and most of the state was still short water."
"If my grandfather spotted a rattlesnake while driving, he would stop his car and go into the brush after it. To do less, he advised me more than once, was to endanger whoever later entered the brush, and so violate what he called "the code of the West." New people, I was told, did not understand their responsibility to kill rattlesnakes. Nor did new people understand that the water that came from the tap in, say, San Francisco was there only because part of Yosemite had been flooded to put it there. New people did not understand the necessary dynamic of the fires, the seven-year cycles of flood and drought, the physical reality of the place."
"I was many times told as a child that the grass in the Sacramento Valley had at the time of the American settlers arrived in the 1840s grown so high that it could be tied over a saddle, the point being that it did no more. California, in this telling, had even then been "spoiled." The logical extension of this thought, that we were the people who had spoiled it, remained unexplored."
