Every three of four months I go back to Berkeley. I’m never quite sure why. Probably for the obvious reasons—to pump the thin grey crud that passes for air in New York out of my lungs and to try to store up enough California ozone to get me through a few weeks back East; to feel the sun on my skin, unfiltered by exhaust; to look at the Bay and smell incredible semitropical plants that flower year ’round; to walk along wide streets where drivers smile and stop so that you can cross safely; to forget about the nervous, animal hours on the Penn Central. To be human again for a few days before returning to New York.
A splendid place, impossible to describe convincingly to anyone who’s come to accept as the national norm the grime and squalor and incivility of the big cities of the Northeast. Perhaps that’s why the Berkeley New Left so incenses me. They belong in the teeming megalopolitan East, if anywhere, not here in Berkeley, where they and their enormities appear all the more offensive by contrast with the background. The place is simply too good for them to be fighting their dirty little revolution in.
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