Seattle Is This Curious Liberal Island.

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.

Simply As A Writer Of Books I'm Thrilled And Proud That Seattle Should Have Raised, On A Public Vote, Sufficient Money To Build A Central Library, And Moreover To Rebuild Every Other Library In The City: 28 Of Them.

All This Piling Up Of One Technology On Top Of Another-railroad On Steamboat, Interstate Highway On Railroad, Hydroelectric Dam On Watermill-had Reduced The Mississippi From A Wonder Of Nature To This Sluggish Canal On The Wrong Side Of The Tracks.

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

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.