The Pacific Ocean is seen in the distance beyond palm trees and the charred remains of homes destroyed by the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California on January 13, 2025. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images hide title
Los Angeles has long been a dreamscape, a screen city on the edge of the ocean that attracts people from all over the world, despite the looming threat of earthquakes or scorching wildfires.
Many great writers were drawn to Los Angeles.
Michael Connelly, the great crime writer from Philadelphia, wrote in his 2008 book: "In Los Angeles, everyone is from somewhere else, but no one is really anchored." brass verdict. "People are attracted to dreams, people are fleeing nightmares...Everyone in Los Angeles is packing their bags. Just in case."
Héctor Tobar, the son of Guatemalan immigrants, wrote in his 2011 novel Barbarian Nursery", "The train brought them to this place called Los Angeles, where magic and reality, the world of fantasy books and the world of history, seemed to coexist on the same extended stage composed of streets, rivers and railroad tracks. "
Robert B. Parker brought his famous Boston private eye Spenser to Los Angeles to film the 1981 novel, savage landand observed, “Los Angeles is a giant, sunny clown city…where dreams meet the ocean…”
Raymond Chandler, one of the inventors of the detective novel, grew up in the American Midwest and London before settling in California. He wrote at the beginning of his 1938 short story "Red Wind": "A desert wind blew that night. It was a hot, dry Santa Ana wind that blew down from the mountain passes and curled your hair and made your Nerves jump, your brain trembles. "Skin itch." "
Those Santa Anas hurricanes, which pushed dry air from the Great Basin toward the California coast, fueled this month's devastating wildfires.
“The weather in Los Angeles is disaster, apocalyptic weather,” California native Joan Didion said in her 1968 essay collection, Slouching towards Bethlehem.
“Santa Ana’s violence and unpredictability affected the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, exacerbating its instability and unreliability,” Joan Didion writes. "The wind showed us how close we were to the edge."
As we grapple with an increasing number of fires, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes, we may feel the poignancy of her words rocking the hearts of Altadena, Asheville, Tampa and Greenfield, Iowa. All of us.