Pearblossom Highway (David Hockney, 1986)
“Until one has crossed a barren desert, without food or water, under a burning tropical sun, at three miles an hour, one can form no conception of what misery is.” These are the words of a gold-seeker, who took the southern route to California in 1849. Even when one is crossing it at seventy miles an hour on a four-lane highway, the desert can seem formidable enough. To the forty-niners it was unmitigated hell.
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A short generation ago you might have wandered and died within only a hundred miles of Los Angeles. Today the mounting tide of humanity has oozed through the intervening canyons and spilled out into the wide Mojave. Solitude is receding at the rate of four and a half kilometers per annum.
And yet, in spite of it all, the silence persists. For this silence of the desert is such that casual sounds, and even the systematic noise of civilization, cannot abolish it. They coexist with it — as small irrelevancies at right angles to an enormous meaning, as veins of something analogous to darkness within an enduring transparency … On the trunks of cottonwood trees, on the wooden walls of barns and houses, the woodpeckers rattle away like pneumatic drills. Picking one’s way between the cactus and the creosote bushes one hears, like some tiny whirring clockwork, the soliloquies of invisible wrens, the calling, at dusk, of the nightjays …
Walt Disney Productions, 1953
Progress, however, is on the march. Jet planes are already as characteristic of the desert as are Joshua trees or burrowing owls; they soon will be almost as numerous. The wilderness has entered the armament race, and will be in it to the end. In its multimillion-acred emptiness there is room enough to explode atomic bombs and experiment with guided missiles. The weather, so far as flying is concerned, is uniformly excellent, and in the plains lay the flat beds of many lakes, dry since the last Ice Age, and manifestly intended by Providence for hot-rod racing and jets. Huge airfields have already been constructed. Factories are going up. Oases are turning into industrial towns.
Miss Atomic Bomb (Nevada), 1957
In brand-new Reservations, surrounded by barbed wire and the FBI, not Indians but tribes of physicists, chemists, metallurgists, communication engineers, and mechanics are working with the coordinated frenzy of termites. From their air-conditioned laboratories and machine shops there flows a steady stream of marvels, each one more expensive and more fiendish than the last. The desert silence is still there; but so, ever more noisily, are the scientific irrelevancies. Give the boys in the Reservations a few more years and another hundred billion dollars, and they will succeed (for with technology all things are possible) in abolishing the silence.
Aldous Huxley, The Desert
Collected Essays, 1934
Related Reading: Leaving Las Vegas (Carver’s Dog)
Filed under: Hideous Music and the Sound of Many Shotguns | Tagged: Aldous Huxley, Huxley essays, Mojave Desert, The Desert, writers, writing
Years ago (late 50’s early 60’s), I remember my Father commenting on Vegas while he drove us up to visit my Uncle, “wow the desert is pitch black at night and from 50 miles away you can see the glow of Vegas in the dark, like a jewel shinning in the night”.
Now I think, Christ it’ll be nice when we get far enough away so that the desert is black like it’s supposed to be at night, and that garish monstrosity that is Vegas fades into darkness