RESPONSE
A Vision of the West

Twenty years ago, I visited a friend in Ojai, two hours north of Los Angeles. Footing the San Pedro Mountains, the Ojai valley exudes an otherworldly purity. Frank Capra’s 1937 film "Lost Horizon," used a long shot of Ojai as "Shangri-la"—a place of potentially eternal life. It was in this idyllic spot that, after 53 years of indifference to nature, this urbanite was jarred into a quite different, and inconvenient, sensibility.

I was walking in Ojai before dawn. Silhouetted mountains were emerging from darkness. The world was uncannily silent. From nowhere came the sudden conviction that I had lived here a thousand years before! Not true, of course, but the force of the experience—like a dream that grips one after waking—meant that something had happened within me. Indeed, it had. From that moment on I was needful of living in the West!—a consequence no less absurd than its apparent cause.

Perhaps I had never been rooted. Detachment dogs the philosophic disposition. But all my life was in the East! I struggled fruitlessly to forget the awakening. Years later, as a widower married again, I drove West many times. What had awakened me to place in Ojai opened me to nature on those trips. Breaking out of Nebraskan farmland, the great sky and distant mountains of the western landscape overwhelmed me with a vision of the holy. Rolling southwest, the boundless space was a freeing of soul entire. And in the desert, eternity was written in the naked erosion of the peaks.

No doubt the beauty of the East is truth as well, but its truth is that of opera while the West’s is of chorale. The operatic Verdi "Requiem," like gospel, adopts the human standpoint—it is a human crying out—while Bach’s "Toccatas" and "B Minor Mass" look from heaven on the human situation. In religious terms, they say, perhaps, that God, like western space, is imperturbable.

The eastern glen and hillock welcome us. What point the trackless West—the spiny plants and rocky strata? Just this, perhaps: We ask what these unsparing features are to us—but in the West, they ask what are we to them. More planetary than geographic, the western landscape speaks of what must be. There what lives a little while and what exists for eons meet as children of the sun that in time ends them. Looking West, for me, is looking home.
—Alan Soffin