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Seattle Was Built Out On Pilings Over The Sea, And At High Tide The Whole City Seemed To Come Afloat Like A Ship Lifting Free From A Mud Berth And Swaying In Its Chains.

-Jonathan Raban

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Seattle Was Built Out

Jonathan Raban

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Seattle Was Built Out On Pilings Over The Sea, And At High Tide The Whole City Seemed To Come Afloat Like A Ship Lifting Free From A Mud Berth And Swaying In Its Chains.

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To The Newcomer Who Has Not Learned Its Language, A Large City Is A Chaos Of Details, A Vast Woolworths Store Of Differently Colored, Simlarly Priced Objects.

Heartbreak Comes In Different Sizes, And The Departure Of An 18-year-old Child For A Far College Has To Be Treated As A Very Benign Form Of The Disease.

Democrats Inhabit The Low Shores Of Puget Sound, Mostly On Its Eastern Side, In A Ragged Trail Of Port-cities That Stretches From Bellingham, Close To The Canadian Border, Through Everett, Seattle, And Tacoma, To Olympia, The State Capital, At The Southern End Of The Sound.

In Novels And Autobiographies, The First Positive Move That The Immigrant Makes Towards Assimilation Is To Buy Himself A Suit Of City Clothes.

It Always Seems To Me Odd To Call A Place A Wilderness When Every Wilderness Area In The Us Bristles With Rules And Regulations As To How You Can Behave, What You're Allowed To Do, And Is Patrolled By Armed Rangers Enforcing The Small Print. They're Parks, Of Course, Not Wildernesses At All.

Rules And Regulations

The Trouble With Ghostwriting Is That It Raises The Issue Of Whether The President Is In A State Of Diminished Responsibility For What He Says. Does He Actually Grasp The Implications Of The Words He Speaks?

The North-south Line Of 'the Mountains,' Meaning The Cascade Range, Forty Miles East Of Seattle, Is A Rigid Political Frontier.

Inaugurals Conventionally Start With A History Lesson And Finish With A Prayer.

Spells Of Acute Loneliness Are An Essential Part Of Travel. Loneliness Makes Things Happen.

Make Things Happen

At Night, What You See Is A City, Because All You See Is Lights. By Day, It Doesn't Look Like A City At All. The Trees Out-number The Houses. And That's Completely Typical Of Seattle. You Can't Quite Tell: Is It A City, Is It A Suburb, Is The Forest Growing Back?

My New City [seattle] And Its Hinterland Felt Deceptively Homely. Their Similar Latitude Gave Them The Angular Light And Lingering Evenings I Was Used To. Their Damp Marine Weather, Blowing In From The Southwest, Came In The Right Direction. When The Mountains Are Hidden Under A Low Sky, One Might Almost Imagine Oneself To Be In Britain.

Seattle Is This Curious Liberal Island.

Interstate Highways Dull The Reality Of Place And Distance Almost As Effectively As Jetliners Do: I Loathe Their Scary Monotony.

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Funny Inspirational

Life, As The Most Ancient Of All Metaphors Insists, Is A Journey; And The Travel Book, In Its Deceptive Simulation Of The Journey's Fits And Starts, Rehearses Life's Own Fragmentation. More Even Than The Novel, It Embraces The Contingency Of Things.

Books Admitted Me To Their World Open-handedly, As People For Their Most Part, Did Not. The Life I Lived In Books Was One Of Ease And Freedom, Worldly Wisdom, Glitter, Dash And Style.

Seattle Was Built Out On Pilings Over The Sea, And At High Tide The Whole City Seemed To Come Afloat Like A Ship Lifting Free From A Mud Berth And Swaying In Its Chains.

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Living In Cities Is An Art, And We Need The Vocabulary Of Art, Of Style, To Describe The Peculiar Relationship Between Man And Material That Exists In The Continual Creative Play Of Urban Living. The City As We Imagine It, Then, Soft City Of Illusion, Myth, Aspiration, And Nightmare, Is As Real, Maybe More Real, Than The Hard City One Can Locate On Maps In Statistics, In Monographs On Urban Sociology And Demography And Architecture.

Travel. It Was An Intransitive Verb. It Didn't Involve Any Destinations. It Was Going To The Going's Sake, To Be Anywhere But Where You Were, With Motion Itself As The Only Object.

One Of The Oddest Features Of Western Christianized Culture Is Its Ready Acceptance Of The Myth Of The Stable Family And The Happy Marriage. We Have Been Taught To Accept The Myth Not As An Heroic Ideal, Something Good, Brave, And Nearly Impossible To Fulfil, But As The Very Fiber Of Normal Life. Given Most Families And Most Marriages, The Belief Seems Admirable But Foolhardily.

The Mythical America?that Marvellous, Heroic, Sentimental Landwas An Object Of Faith. It Challenged You To Make The Believer's Leap Over The Rude Facts At Your Feet.

Over Emphatic Negatives Always Suggest That What Is Being Denied May Be What Is Really Being Asserted.

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Insofar As I Think About Postmodernism At All, And It Doesn't Exactly Keep Me Awake At Nights, I Think Of It As Something That Happens To One, Not A Style One Affects. We're Postmoderns Because We're Not Modernists. The Modernist Writerspound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williamsspoke With A Kind Of Vatic Authority: They Were Really The Last Of The Romantics, For Whom Authorship Itself Was Like Being A Solitary Prophet In The Wasteland.

It's Been So Long Since A Talented Writer Last Occupied The White House; No Wonder, Then, That American Writers Have Been Among The Most Prominent Of All The Demographic Groups Claiming A Piece Of Barack Obama For Themselves.

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The City Has Always Been An Embodiment Of Hope And A Source Of Feeling Guilt; A Dream Pursued, And Found Vain, Wanting, And Destructive.

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There's An Enduring American Compulsion To Be On The Side Of The Angels. Expediency Alone Has Never Been An Adequate American Reason For Doing Anything. When Actions Are Judged, They Go Before The Bar Of God, Where Mom And The Flag Closely Flank His Presence.

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Washington State

By The End Of The 1980s, Seattle Had Taken On The Dangerous Lustre Of A Promised City. The Rumour Had Gone Out That If You Had Failed In Detroit You Might Yet Succeed In Seattle - And That If You'd Succeeded In Seoul, You Could Succeed Even Better In Seattle... Seattle Was The Coming Place. So I Joined The Line Of Hopefuls.

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Every White House Has Had Its Intellectuals, But Very Few Presidents Have Been Intellectuals Themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, The List More Or Less Stops There.

The Falklands Held A Mirror Up To Our Own Islands, And It Reflected, In Brilliantly Sharp Focus, All Our Injured Belittlement, Our Sense Of Being Beleaguered, Neglected And Misunderstood.

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Seattle Is Not An Overly Friendly City. It Is A Civil City, But Not Altogether Friendly. People From Outside Mistake The Civility For Friendliness. Seattle Is Full Of People Who Have Their Own Lives To Live. They Won't Waste Their Time Being Friendly. But They Are Civil.

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