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do about the greatness of this natural disaster, the foehn, that dries the hills and the
nerves to the flashpoint(480).
Furthermore, the name of the foehn, the Santa Ana might be significant too,
because it is not adventitious. It appears 14 times in the text, and after a while it seems to
be obsessive to the narrator, but meanwhile imminent. Neither we, nor the narrator can
deny the importance of the Santa Ana. It has an overwhelming effect over the whole
environment and in the mean time on life itself. As the narrator says it herself: To live
with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view
of human behavior.(481) This acceptance of the Santa Ana seems somehow weird. Why
doesnt anybody try to do something, why is everybody so indulgent with this aspect of
their lives? I believe this is the key to the understanding of the whole text. People accept
the life they are given without protesting in any way and this is the fact that disintegrates
their world. They only seem like some robots moving around, their personalities are
wiped out by the greatness of the Santa Ana. The mechanistic point of view tends to gain
more field day by day. Humans have a tendency to lose their own selves when being
surrounded by a greater force then they are. They nevertheless give up fighting, they in a
way or other indulge to their situation whether they like it or not. This explains the 14
appearances of the name Santa Ana, the magnitude of this name and this appearance.
Contrasting to the fact that we all seem to understand and know many things
about the Santa Ana, at a point the narrator says: It is hard for people who have not lived
in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local
imagination.(482). This is one more strange situation: for two pages we have been
informed about the Santa Ana, we have read its geographical description, and concrete
data was given to us about the foehn and its victims, and yet somehow when we feel that
finally we begin to understand more about this foehn, our wings are cut off, and we are
told in a more polite way that we should not even try it, because we will never understand
the Santa Ana the way they, the inhabitants of Los Angeles understand it. In this context,
the word radical means thoroughgoing or extreme, which signifies that although those
living in Los Angeles accept the facts, they still feel it, care about it, but yet something
stops them from acting against the fact they dislike.
The impossibility of acting against the authority, in this case the Santa Ana
enslaves the inhabitants of Los Angeles to subsume their selves. This is the main cause of
the disintegration of the world they live in. This is the reality: they make their own world
a disintegrated one by their acts, better said by their passivity to the events. The sentence
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are(482) backs up this idea of passivity.
How come the wind shows us? Why shouldnt we show something to the wind, is it true
that we cannot show anything in our condition of human beings in a disintegrated world?
The sad response to this question that comes up from Didions piece of work is that
indeed, the inhabitants of Los Angeles, as we all, are not capable of doing something. Our
minuteness in front of nature is striking. We are nothing considering the forces of nature
and we are nothing considering the whole universe. We are not able to change anything
because our humanity was forgotten from the moment when we subsumed ourselves to
the greatness of nature.
Further examples of the disintegrated world are the second and third passages of
the text, passages that do not have much to do with the text we have discussed until this
moment. After two pages of dry description, we are harbored in a human world, where
Works Cited:
Didion, Joan. Los Angeles Notebook. The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of
Literary Journalism. Eds. Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1997. 480-84.