Steve Pyne, author of Fire: A Brief History, suggested that the trend could deserve its own era in time. “So vast is the magnitude of these changes that we might rightly speak of a coming Fire Age equivalent in stature to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene. Call it the Pyrocene.”

“It’s just an immensely powerful, largely secret government,” Davis said.

“What people don’t see is resolve—primarily, the resolve to sustain,” Shaw said. “The resolve to keep alive a sense of hope.”

Mandy Patinkin and I talked about it on the phone. “When you take someone like Jen Tullock,” he said, “who is incapable of not being alive, she has an immediate addictive quality to anybody she comes in contact with. Because she is so alive. It’s not just about being talented or brilliant or beautiful; it’s about being hungry and alive for the few

“Willing yourself into being is such a western concept,” George said. “That idea of, ‘I’m going west, there’s fewer rules there. I can do whatever.’”

Los Angeles, California, is enormously ambiguous. It is ambiguously enormous. Almost ninety separate villages of more than ten million people, spread across more than forty-five hundred square miles of swampland glazed by cement, mountains and canyons abutting an ocean, desert parcels cracked by quakes.

Jean K. Williams’s Bridget “Biddy” Mason: From Slave to Businesswoman, Mason’s family quoted her saying, “If you hold your hand closed, nothing good can come of it. The open hand is blessed, for it gives abundance, even as it receives.”

Both through her fiction and in her diaries Butler demonstrated that no one was a nobody. To be a person in whatever place or time had value. Self-doubting, self-made, self-helped, the city-state’s prophet suffered and thrived on things found in the world and mind. Both gave her pain. Both gave her art. So be it. See to it. She found a way.

To be moved is different from being manipulated.