Time & Perspective Quote by Alison Lurie

Alison Lurie’s line lands because it flatters and needles at the same time. Europe, in the American imagination, is a museum you can walk through: cathedrals, ruins, a “living past” preserved by etiquette and stone. Lurie pivots that tourism logic westward and makes Southern California the opposite kind of destination: not a repository but a prototype. The joke is slyly architectural. In SoCal, the present always looks like a draft—strip malls, subdivisions, studio backlots, freeways—built to be replaced, not revered. If Europe is where Americans go for patina, Southern California is where they go to see what happens when a culture decides speed beats permanence.

The subtext is about American power and American amnesia. Postwar California was the convergence point for aerospace, entertainment, defense money, and mass migration: an economy designed around images, mobility, and reinvention. Calling it “the future” isn’t pure praise; it’s a warning about what the future will feel like. The future here is bright, engineered, and slightly fake, a place where weather is managed, identities are performed, and history is treated as optional. Even the landscape participates: earthquakes and fires remind you that stability is an agreement, not a fact.

Lurie, a novelist attuned to manners and self-mythology, reads Southern California as America’s testing ground for a new kind of life: less rooted, more mediated, endlessly upgradeable. She makes that diagnosis in one clean, travel-brochure sentence—and lets the unease do the talking.