There’s been a spate of Westerns on television and at the movies. Bully.
But what intrigues me most about the West in the United States, and I do live about as far West as you can go without moving to Hawaii, is the pioneering spirit.
People complain less in California than they do in other parts of the country. And I don’t believe it’s due to the better weather or grander space. Something happens to people when they take that wagon train/plane/1992 Geo Prizm across the country. It’s like, if you’re going to trek all the way across a continent, well, you better be in a can-do mood when you get to the other side. And for the most part, people are and they do.
Joan Didion famously wrote:
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
2 comments:
Or you can do what I did - whine for 5 years and move back East.
What does Arnold think about this hypothesis?
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