Sometimes Awful Things Have Their Own Beauty.

A Few Times In My Life I've Had Moments Of Absolute Clarity, When For A Few Brief Seconds The Silence Drowns Out The Noise And I Can Feel Rather Than Think, And Things Seem So Sharp. And The World Seems So Fresh As Though It Had All Just Come Into Existence. I Can Never Make These Moments Last. I Cling To Them, But Like Everything, They Fade. I Have Lived My Life On These Moments. They Pull Me Back To The Present, And I Realize That Everything Is Exactly The Way It Was Meant To Be.

In Order To Get The Worst Possible First Impression Of Los Angeles One Should Arrive There By Bus, Preferably In Summer And On A Saturday Night.

The Landscape, Like Los Angeles Itself, Is Transitional. Impermanence Haunts The City, With Its Mushroom Industries--the Aircraft Perpetually Becoming Obsolete, The Oil Which Must One Day Be Exhausted, The Movies Which Fill America's Theatres For Six Months And Are Forgotten. Many Of Its Houses--especially The Grander Ones--have A Curiously Disturbing Atmosphere, A Kind Of Psychological Dankness Which Smells Of Anxiety, Overdrafts, Uneasy Lust, Whisky, Divorce And Lies.

But Now Isn’t Simply Now. Now Is Also A Cold Reminder: One Whole Day Later Than Yesterday, One Year Later Than Last Year. Every Now Is Labeled With Its Date, Rendering All Past Nows Obsolete, Until — Later Of Sooner — Perhaps — No, Not Perhaps — Quite Certainly: It Will Come.

To Live Sanely In Los Angeles ... You Have To Cultivate The Art Of Staying Awake. You Must Learn To Resist (firmly But Not Tensely) The Unceasing Hypnotic Suggestions Of The Radio, The Billboards, The Movies And The Newspapers; Those Demon Voices Which Are Forever Whispering In Your Ear What You Should Desire, What You Should Fear, What You Should Wear And Eat And Drink And Enjoy, What You Should Think And Do And Be.