From Joan Didion’s “Where I Was From”
Stressing as it did an extreme if ungrounded individualism, this was not an ambiance that tended toward a view of life as defined or limited or controlled, or even in any way affected, by the social and economic structures of the larger world. To be a Californian was to see oneself, if one believed the lessons the place seemed most immediately to offer, as affected only by “nature” … Much of the California landscape has tended to present itself as metaphor, even as litany: the redwoods (for a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday), the Mojave (in the midst of life we are in death), the coast at Big Sur, Mono Lake, the great vistas of the Sierra, especially those of Yosemite Valley, which, Kevin Starr has pointed out, “offered Californians an objective correlative for their ideal sense of themselves: a people animated by heroic imperatives.”
…
This is interesting, a quite naked expression of what has been the California conundrum. 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 words of man in a millisecond, all human beings were of course but as worms, their “heroic imperatives” finally futile, their philosophical inquiries vain. The population of California has increased in my lifetime from 6 million to close to 35 million people, yet the three phrases that first come to mind when I try to define California to myself refer exclusively to its topography, a landscape quite empty of people.
