I found on a photocopied page this little passage by my favorite writer of all time.
I don't know if a high school teacher gave this to me/us or if this was something I photocopied myself in college, but it's worth copying here:
"Many People in the East (or "back East," as they say in California, although not in LaScala or Ernie's) do not believe this. They have been to Los Angeles or to San Francisco, have driven through a giant redwood and have seen the Pacific glazed by the afternoon sun off Big Sur, and they naturally tend to believe that they have in fact been to California. They have not been, and they probably will never be, for it is a longer and in many ways more difficult trip than they may want to undertake, one of those trips on which the destination flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever receding, ever diminishing...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."
And so I'm only going half way (back)... to start.
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