Take a long drive with me, on California One.

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The last time I was in California at all was about six years ago, when I was looking at and interviewing for graduate programs. I was in my senior year in college; much to the righteous and rightful chagrin of my advisors (who held—correctly—that my time would have been better spent composing my senior thesis on Malory’s holy grail tale) I flew out twice: once to interview for the neuroscience program at UCSF, and once to visit the English program at Stanford.

I didn’t get in to UCSF, but I did get in to Stanford. While I was visiting UCSF I had that sort of epiphany that pushes you over the edge. I knew I should go into literature and not into neuroscience. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll point you to my Open Letters review of Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was A Neuroscientist (on which, by the way, I’m fast realizing I was far too easy), and my anecdote at the end:

I add to Snow’s my own anecdote: Several years ago, I was interviewing for a graduate position in a neuroscience program, and I had a chat with one of the professors in whose lab I could potentially have worked. I mentioned that I’d studied literature alongside neuroscience as an undergraduate, and that I was also applying to English graduate programs. “Oh,” she said, “you don’t need to go to graduate school to study literature! And if you did, you certainly couldn’t keep up with neuroscience. But if you came here, you could keep up with literature. You could join my book club; I’ll put in a good word for you.”

And I’ve held that as a standard of the true gap that separates the sciences from the arts ever since.

But neither of the times I visited six years ago gave me true perspective on the state. The last time I had any such perspective was when I came here perhaps twelve or fifteen years ago, in January, on holiday with my family. There’s a photograph of me sitting on some rocks looking out at the ocean that I still think of, even though I can’t remember what I was thinking, because I have that look about me that I’ve been feeling ever since I landed here, one month ago, in the place where I was born—but to which I’ve really felt no significant connection until now.

This past month has given me a taste of blood, so much so that I know I will return, regardless of what I have to do to get here. Perhaps not to Los Angeles, though I wouldn’t object. But to this curious state of contradictions. Of oceans and desert, richness and decay, city and nullity. Enormous blue skies.

I tried, while I was at Cambridge, to imagine, constantly, what it would be like to live in California, and that is because I was certain I would be going to Stanford after I finished my MPhil. I saw myself on a bike, riding around amongst the achingly beautiful buildings on that campus, I saw myself befriending people with cars, I saw myself hemmed within the lush green valleys and rich golden stuccos.

But when I reapplied I got into Columbia (I hadn’t the first time round) and the decision was made for me. It’s curious, because until then, and then from that point until now, I had always thought of myself as an east coast person. Spending four years in Cambridge, MA, had convinced me that the east coast was fully in line with my mentality and with how I saw the world.

My most significant reason for remaining in the east is quite personal. The lesser reasons seem, now, quite foolish if not overly naive. For example, I was afraid that moving to California would entail my getting a car, and struggling with it daily.

I realize now I love to drive. I love being alone in an enclosed space, being able to say and do whatever I like, seeing the stretch of open road, negotiating with my fellow drivers, reading the highway signs, even things like driving at night, or in the rain, or getting stuck in traffic. I love the independence and freedom and sense of adventure you get driving, particularly out here, where there are just endless vistas and structures and skies, the sorts of things you do not see, ever, in the crammed-in cities in the east.

Also I was afraid I would feel like a foreigner. I ought not to have worried that, because I’ve never felt more at home, at peace, at ease, than I have this past month. But I worried that being in California would be like being on another planet.

But it is like being on another planet! I thought at one point in Death Valley that maybe what I was seeing was what other people would see, years from now, on Mars. The language is different. The food is different. The mentality is different. The way the colors are—different entirely.

I have been incredibly productive during this month, albeit probably not in the directions most appropriate to where I am and what I am doing just now. Perhaps someday you’ll see what I mean.

I have, as I mentioned, also never felt so relaxed as I have this past month. Largely this is perhaps because the entire kinetics of New York—which I love, I have to say, and to which I feel I have become addicted in part—are utterly absent. Life just gets leached out of you here. Life, and anxiety. And as someone who has experienced chronic anxiety, I cannot communicate to you the difference between Here and There. It sounds trite, to say I have not been so relaxed in a long time. But this is a sea change for me. I could have tapered off the medication (for example) and still been fine. I really do believe that. It’s like looking in the mirror and seeing a completely different person there, instead of the one to which you’ve become used.

And driving on the California One. I understand song lyrics so much better now. I see why people want to be here, and to stay here.

You know, it’s curious, because I felt an equivalent way about New York. That city is overwhelming to a startling degree, if you are not prepared for it (particularly if you have spent previously, say a year, living in a tiny village-like town where all the buildings predate you by at least four centuries and where cows hang out in the fields every day). I think after five or so years I have figured out parts of it, and I have figured out why I like it, and why I would stay there if given the choice.

But I feel like an entirely different kind of person out here.

When I was in the cab, one month ago, on January 31, from LAX to the rental car place downtown on Figueroa (I had to ask them how to pronounce it) that I’d chosen at random because it was somewhere that wasn’t the airport and I knew I wouldn’t be able to navigate my way out of the airport in my first serious car excursion really ever, but in effect in over seven years’ time—-when I was in that cab, I remember looking at the palm trees lining what must have been the 110, and thinking:

This month will go by too quickly. And I will never want to leave when it is done.

And this is true, in ways you cannot possibly imagine.

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