(not sure where I read this... an essay, for sure, but what/where?)
Henry Miller
"It may indeed be the highest wisdom," he wrote, "to elect to be a nobody in a relative paradise such as this rather than a celebrity in a world which has lost all sense of values."
This is the way I always go. Not only because it's faastest, but because despite the conventional wisdom, I find it the most beautiful of all. California natives always call it just "the Five": not Highway Five or Interstate Five or I-5. The whole road is some 1,380 miles long, and is the only US interstate touching the borders of both Mexico and Canada. If, like me, you prefer to drive rather than to fly between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, the 400 or so miles along this route are the most distinctively Californian, the most revealing of the strange diversity of this landscape and its people, its terrible moral conflicts, and the weird vitality of its countless subcultures. The Five is unendingly rich and full of interest, despite all caricatures to the contrary; despite, or rather because of its glowing, gorgeous emptiness.
