The photo used in the header to this Web log, at least in the form in which I launch the site today—a scene of the Golden Gate Bridge as captured from the Marin Headlands, with the towers of San Francisco inscribing a dim palimpsest behind the inevitable fog of the Bay—is a visual cliché. Too bad, I like it. I took the photograph in the fall of 2000, during my maiden trip to California. On a crisp September morning, a big blue bus deposited me and perhaps three dozen other tourists at a “scenic overlook” for a brief stop before proceeding to the packaged destinations of Sausalito and the Muir Woods. As directed, we put down our backpacks, drew out our cameras, and snapped perhaps three dozen time-stamped variations of this timeless image.
There is discovery, and then there is recognition. Just because others have already gleaned and trapped an instance of beauty doesn’t mean that it isn’t still beautiful. I and my fellow tourist-bus sheep knew a good thing when we saw it (or we did, at any rate, after our driver-shepherd pointed it out to us). Making a Kodak moment of it—of this matchless vista that nature and civilization had conspired to throw up at the continent’s edge—was an entirely apt response.
I view this Web journal as an exercise in recognition, as an effort to give notice of items that catch my eye and linger in my brain pan. But the Golden Gate photo offers another kind of inspiration for my online chronicle. All writing, if it works, creates a bridge of sorts—a broad and noble span from the mind to the world, and from mind to mind. And some writing, if it’s really good, helps the reader peer through a fog, revealing signs of civilized life on the other side of it.
Clichés? Too bad, I like them.
