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The Glorious Happenstance of Destiny in All Place and Time The Art of Mapping Real Life in Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City:  A San Francisco Atlas and Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker’s Unfathomable City:  A New Orleans Atlas     Originally published 16 October 2014 In the great flux and flow of life, the western mind since the time of Aristotle has divided each and every thing into categories and given permanent labels from a language which itself is divided. From its “religion of exile” that began in a moment of great split, the Fall from the Garden,¹ intention became separate from knowing, good became an opposite of evil, light separate from dark instead of a natural cycle of it, judgments of right...

Completing the Story of Richard V. Francaviglia’s Go East, Young Man:  Imagining the American West as the Orient “The lives we live depend upon the stories we tell.”  Lee R. Edwards (paraphrasing Joan Didion) “The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake . . . but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.  It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.”  Joan Didion “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become...