California: Frozen In Golden Light
Aldous Huxley, whose novel Brave New World is often seen as partly inspired by Hollywood's shallow excesses, said about his adopted state: “California… with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life... Its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character."
But where did the British author voluntarily spend the final 26 years of his life? The same state he put down for rejecting tradition and embracing sketchy philosophies. The irony is that Huxley—a psychedelic pioneer who first took LSD in 1953—was accused of promoting a charlatan philosophy. But the “charlatan” philosophies that a state like California nurtures sometimes turn out to be groundbreaking.
Huxley’s now considered the godfather of modern psychedelic therapy research, a field that's undergoing a significant renaissance. As the author certainly understood, California’s too big and complicated to capture with a single narrative. Along with its “flavorless cosmopolitanism,” California (Huxley lived in Los Angeles) also provided him with stimulating work, an intellectual community, and personal freedom.
One’s point of view, in a place as vast and multi-faceted as California, shapes impressions of the state. From Bakersfield, it looks like Texas. From Palo Alto, it looks like the future. From downtown L.A. and San Francisco, it looks ungovernable. My view was shaped—and it remains the same today—on a family road trip (seven people in a station wagon) from upstate New York to California when I was 13 and we’d stopped to take a family photo at a promontory overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. The combination of the magnificence of the bridge and my thoughts about the city it connected to moved me.
Two days later, when my parents, leaving me behind, went into the city with the family friends we were staying with in Palo Alto, I felt an overwhelming sense of loss when they showed me the photos they'd taken. My parents had no idea what a taunt this felt like.
Today, it's easy to get the impression that people are fleeing California not because the land failed, but because success made it unlivable. It's the reverse Grapes of Wrath effect, with hordes of Californians leaving the land of abundance for a flat, dusty place like Texas. We don't hear as much about all those who are simultaneously moving to California. People will always move to California. Many are now delighting in predicting doom for the state. Maybe they forget how well California is at reinventing itself. I hear about California’s wildfires, earthquakes, and droughts—natural disasters that Joan Didion saw as metaphors for California culture—and I hear about taxes, homelessness, and clueless politicians.
California’s as much a symbol for people to project their resentment and political grievances as it is a physical place. As the biggest and bluest of blue states, it's become a punching bag for opponents of progressivism. Rooting for the state’s collapse has become a badge of honor in some political circles.
Long before John Steinbeck wrote about Okies escaping the dust bowl in The Grapes of Wrath, California had the reputation of being a place where people could shed the past and begin again. And that's what it still represents to me. After college, I was feeling trapped living in New York City. So when my college friend who'd moved to San Francisco invited me to move out there, I jumped at the opportunity. I immediately felt free in beautiful, sunlit California, with its palm trees waving in the wind like they do on carefree Pacific islands.
New York would be more bearable if weekend escapes from the rat race were more possible, but nobody has a car there. Heading south for an hour from where I lived in Manhattan would get me to Staten Island. Riding the ferry’s fun, but it's like going to New Jersey. I bought a car in San Francisco, and an hour's drive would get me to Big Sur, a dramatic 90-mile stretch of California coastline where the Santa Lucia Mountains plunge directly into the Pacific Ocean. Heading north for an hour brought me to the rolling hills and wines of Napa Valley. Or I could swing west, over to Route 1 in Sonoma County, a drive that gave me elevated views from a winding coastal road of crashing waves, hidden beaches, and rocky cliffs. There was a biker bar overlooking Tomales Bay that served BBQ oysters, making it a fine turnaround point back to the city.
My feelings about California have been formed by impressions and fragments of the imagination that no accumulation of negative facts will dislodge. I moved out of the state years ago, and have no original thoughts on the current situation there. If only all the pundits rejoicing in the state's woes—some have never even visited the state—would spare us their uninformed and biased opinions.
That said, friends still visit the state and report back to me. The impression they convey is that, in a general sense, California isn't the place it once was. It's experiencing a cost-of-living crisis—an inequality politicians, knowing how easy it is to escape accountability when one political party always wins, try to mask with empty progressive rhetoric.
I don't think much about visiting California again. I’ve seen most of it already, and there are still countless places I haven’t explored. Those places pose no risk of disappointing me by not living up to a past altered by irreversible mistakes and unalterable loss. California’s a bold experiment on a downward trajectory at the moment, but it's resilient. I prefer to let it remain in my mind as a place preserved exactly as I experienced it, like an old photo I pull out of a drawer that looks the same every time.