Chapter 1 

"So," he says, "let's walk down from the butt-end of Oakland, across the city line to Berkeley, down Telegraph and into the campus. There will be a hundred different sights and feelings that will tumble from the buildings and passer-bys! And at that desolate corner of Telegraph and Alcatraz with its dissolute traffic intersecting at that point along with its regular and transients moving along the street, shuffling along or darting across the avenues with dogs wandering, children playing on concrete steps all with the ambience of an old movie not believing its a town or section of a city. We shall meet an elderly red-faced gentleman with a paper tucked under his arm, an old hankerchiefed peasant-looking woman pulling her shopping cart behind her, roller skating children, folks going in and out of the various businesses, sulking bums (one is a fast moving slick haired black dressed middleaged buy who has a limp and a cane and who goes from phone booth to phone booth looking for dimes), past Ashby with its more traffic, more people, newer offices and buildings, better dressed people until we will reach that area from Dwight onward with lurking transients in doorways and people on mats talking to themselves or making derisive gestures to people going by; Shakespeare Book Co., the shops on the dirty street, peddlers, street artists, bubbles, depression, pain, attempts joy, dogs, students, foreigners, probably Iranians, Africans passing through each other all the way to Sather Gate and the collective moving crowds flowing through the campus."

So, we did.

In the city the senses read bad things; in nature they are delighted.

"Television," he was telling me in the donut shop, "seems more real because it imitates memory, imitates the past and as the old poet Williams said, the past always seems more real than the life being lived."

Half the day spend chiding myself on every trivial ridiculous hook one could find. Half the day spent in reviving out of this stupor. A few moments of light and good work.

"Oh horrible night of inscrutable bits of chewed up opinions and garbage." Everything wrong! Wrong path taken! Horrible feelings emitted by the acquaintances and strangers. "Death has taken so many." The smiling life deniers, who can tell them the true relationship is with the truth, with that in the world round with beauty and meaning, not the relationship with vanity and the crude facts that have become little petty gods."

David Eide
January 24, 2014