Love It Or Loathe It — Everyone Has An Opinion About Berkeley
A passionate debate is currently taking place in the Comments section of my last post. It concerns the virtues or otherwise of my adopted home.
If nothing else, this illuminating exchange proves that this diminutive city on the Bay has the power to provoke strong, sometimes emotional opinions.
While I love many aspects of the city, I appreciate it has its faults and quirks — it can be a frustrating place to live too. But rather than offer my opinion — I am a relative newcomer after all — I would like to refer you to a piece that I think wonderfully captures the spirit of the city. It was written by Berkeley author Michael Chabon, and there’s no doubt which side of the fence he sits on:
“Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture. None of these is really an unfamiliar presence in the tree- lined streets of Berkeley, California. For a city of one hundred thousand people — toss in another thirty thousand to account for the transient population of the University — we have more than our share of geniuses. The town, to be honest, is lousy with them. Folklorists, chefs, tattoo artists, yogis, guitarists, biologists of the housefly, GUI theorists, modern masters of algebra, Greil Marcus: we have geniuses in every field and discipline. As for neurosis, you can pretty much start at my house and work your way outward in any direction. Obsession, fixation, phobia, hypochondriasis, self- flagellation, compulsive confession of weakness and wrongdoing, repetition mania, chronic recrimination and second-guessing — from parents of toddlers, to fanatical collectors of wax recordings by Turkish klezmer bands of the 1920s, to non-eaters of anything white or which respires, to that august tribunal of collective neurosis, the Berkeley City Council: if neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever’s swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits and never touch dry land. Madness: a painful thing, which it does not do to romanticize. But it seems to me that among the many sad and homeless people who haunt Berkeley one finds an unusually high number of poets, sages, secret Napoleons and old-fashioned prophets of doom. The mentally ill citizens of Berkeley read, as they kill a winter afternoon in the warmth of the public library; they generate theories, which they will share; they sell their collected works out of a canvas tote bag. As for rapture, it is harder to observe firsthand, and is furthermore something that people, even people in Berkeley, do not necessarily care to discuss. But Berkeley is rich with good places to be rapt: at the eyepiece of an electron microscope or a cloud chamber, at a table at Chez Panisse, in a yoga room, under a pair of headphones at Amoeba Records, in Tilden Park, in the great disorderly labyrinth of Serendipity Books, on the dance floor at Ashkenaz while the ouds jangle and the pipes skirl, in a seat at the Pacific Film Archive watching Kwaidan (Japan, 1965). I’d be willing to bet that, pound for pound, Berkeley is the most enraptured city in America on a daily basis.*
Read the full essay here.
*Originally published in Gourmet. Reprinted in “My California: Journeys by Great Writers” (Angel City Press, 204 pages, $16.95), www.mycaliforniaproject.org. All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2002 by Michael Chabon.
[Photo credit www.alamedainfo.com]
