The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

(Another view of Elvis, from Billboard magazine in 1958, stated, “In one aspect of America’s cultural life, integration has already taken place.”)

If, at the start of this story, the great divide was manifest in musical taste and distaste, that too has begun to close, as musical genres bleed into each other and no longer provide the airtight identities they once did.

Revolution is a phase, a mood—like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.

My own dear city had long been the far edge of the country, not merely in geography, but in possibility, the left coast that presented alternatives and refuges from the mainstream; when Silicon Valley became a—and in some ways the—global power center, it became something else.

The new American cities trade in information, entertainment, tourism, software, finance. They are abstract.

No revolution vanishes without effect.

I once read that we crave, contradictorily, both security and adventure, comfort and challenge.

Expedition. Sets out to accomplish, discover, claim, explore. Sets out with an agenda.

But when exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?