SERIOUS GRAVITY (A SANITY PRIMER)

Growing up out west - we had what was known as the "endless summer" feeling - a moment in the summer when - not Time per se - but hectic, anxious, nerve-wracking time would come to a standstill. Change would still happen of course, things would continue moving, interacting, but at a slower, more predictable pace...the rhythms of summer would take over with sunny days giving way to balmy nights...a certain degree of repetition would lend structure to this seeming "pause" in the action...Clouds still move across the sky, waves still crash against the shore, traffic on the roads, people walking, biking, swimming - but all in a self-contained world over which one had some semblance of control..Long days at the beach, lying in the sun or playing tennis at the community college, watching the heat rise on the pavement, shooting baskets on the outdoor courts, sitting poolside at a neighbor's house, sitting on the lawn at dusk, staying outside on summer nights with no wi

  Historicity...Facticity...Thrownness... Temporality...Geworfenheit...the condition of having been born into a situation, thrown into a particular place and time - having one's Life conditioned by these unique, random, haphazard, non-repeating individual factors...Born into this year - this decade - the 1960s for example...growing up (for the most part) in this other decade (the 1970s) in a particular location, California, the west coast, in a particular milieu, the suburbs, with a stable family, on a quiet street (a former orange and walnut grove), with enough water and rain (or so we thought), on the edge of the desert, east of Los Angeles, a valley surrounded by mountains, a sleepy agricultural town with a college or two, during an uncrowded era of fast-moving freeways, a corner enclave of ranch homes, uphill from a dairy,  a familiar mountain, a horse farm and a dried out river bed, in a neighborhood full of kids on bikes and roller skates, during such and such a time, a postw