A sense of place
In the latest California thread below, Paddy O hits on something important in defining the California (and probably the Western) sensibility, versus the Eastern and Southern one:
Well said. I mentioned to a colleague of mine yesterday (she's a Kansan) how I had the feeling in California that "anything could happen." She said, "Why is that a bad thing?" Which is, I guess, Paddy O's point. Californians, broadly speaking, like the fact that they can be anything they want to be in that lovely, free country. For somebody like me, that "lightness of being" is almost unbearable. A friend of mine, the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, explained to me about 15 years ago that the people who built his native Vancouver were Canadians who ran away from an Eastern establishment that they considered oppressive. He used his own parents as an example of this, and until then, I had never quite thought of it that way with regard to our own West Coast, and its culture.
A reader in Dallas wrote to say that I got Joan Didion all wrong, that she wasn't saying California is unlike the rest of us, but that it is more like us than we are ourselves. What he meant -- and this is a point I agree with -- is that Californians are the ultimate Americans, if you conceive of Americans as people who left behind the weight and constraints of the Old World to create a world in their own image. I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought otherwise in my discussion of Didion. I do believe, as the reader says, that California is the ultimate result of the American experiment, which is why trends that start there manage to roll so easily through the rest of the country: we are culturally prepared for it by virtue of the fact that we are Americans, and all the descendants of restless people.
Even as you feel anxiety about having nothing permanent I, as a Californian, feel that to be an adventure.
Americans have a unity, but we in different regions are still very different. The Western man is not the Southern man even if we watch the same television shows and pray to the same God.
Well said. I mentioned to a colleague of mine yesterday (she's a Kansan) how I had the feeling in California that "anything could happen." She said, "Why is that a bad thing?" Which is, I guess, Paddy O's point. Californians, broadly speaking, like the fact that they can be anything they want to be in that lovely, free country. For somebody like me, that "lightness of being" is almost unbearable. A friend of mine, the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, explained to me about 15 years ago that the people who built his native Vancouver were Canadians who ran away from an Eastern establishment that they considered oppressive. He used his own parents as an example of this, and until then, I had never quite thought of it that way with regard to our own West Coast, and its culture.
A reader in Dallas wrote to say that I got Joan Didion all wrong, that she wasn't saying California is unlike the rest of us, but that it is more like us than we are ourselves. What he meant -- and this is a point I agree with -- is that Californians are the ultimate Americans, if you conceive of Americans as people who left behind the weight and constraints of the Old World to create a world in their own image. I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought otherwise in my discussion of Didion. I do believe, as the reader says, that California is the ultimate result of the American experiment, which is why trends that start there manage to roll so easily through the rest of the country: we are culturally prepared for it by virtue of the fact that we are Americans, and all the descendants of restless people.
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