I love L.A.

It's such a beautiful day today. The windows and doors are all open and the ocean breeze is coming in. Santa Monica Bay is full of sailboats (usually, it's huge freighters; I wonder if they're not allowed to leave port on weekends?) and for a change, it's warm. My house is normally so cold that I have to wear turtlenecks inside. It's the marble floors which were made for a much warmer climate, the one you're supposed to have in L.A. but that doesn't come to this cool microclimate facing the Pacific.

I live on a hill where the sea-facing windows don't need curtains. In the daytime, you hear traffic all the time, including helicopters flying by below you. But at night the surf is the loudest sound, crashing on the rocks the way it has all through the ages; and sometimes the stars are so bright you don't feel you're in the city. When there is a full moon, the moon shadow is so sharp it looks almost cut with a knife.

Other nights, when there are clouds, you feel the lurking presence of the brilliant busy city hidden behind the hill, so lit up so that the whole sky is bright even at two or three in the morning. That glowing sky in the middle of the night always reminds me of this Wordsworth poem, composed on Westminster Bridge in London on September 3, 1802.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
dull would he be of soul who could pass by
a sight so touching in its majesty:
this City now doth, like a garment, wear
the beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
open unto the fields, and to the sky;
all bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
in his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
and all that mighty heart is lying still!

Okay, there's no river, nor fields in town; but aside from that, Wordsworth was expressing what I feel, even though, like him, I don't even really like the city.

Sometimes I think how strange and lucky it is to be living in this time, in this place, like someone living in the "second century of the Christian era," as Edward Gibbon begins his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Then I remember that according to scientists, it's quite normal to be living now, at the time of the biggest human population ever. My ancestors lived in the British Empire when that was the biggest empire, and in France when France was the most powerful nation in Europe, and in the Roman Empire during the second century. No doubt there were Babylonians in the family tree as well.

Los Angeles has that feel about it.

Comments

[chrissoup]

When I lived in L.A. (in Westchester), I liked it too. Thanks for the lovely description.

[Leesa]

I'm visiting from France (Ile de France)... Where'd all the great, sunny weather vanish to since we first got here three weeks ago??? I think it moved back to France!!