Seattle Is This Curious Liberal Island.

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 Writers—pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke 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.

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?

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.

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

One Classic American Landscape Haunts All Of American Literature. It Is A Picture Of Eden, Perceived At The Instant Of History When Corruption Has Just Begun To Set It. The Serpent Has Shown His Scaly Head In The Undergrowth. The Apple Gleams On The Tree. The Old Drama Of The Fall Is Ready To Start All Over Again.