Didion

Didion

Dr. Gray
ENG 905
4 December 2013
Change is Inevitable
Didion’s “Notes from a Native Daughter” talks about how her childhood pasts were forgotten to the ever-changing city that she once used to know. The city had changed drastically from when she was a child and now in her later life. She found it harder to go to the city. What she used to know, is no longer there and is now long gone. Everything is different to her. I think to a point that is understandable. You get so used to things. Even though it was years since she had been to Sacramento, her last memories of the city were what had stuck with her. Coming back to something you could not even recognize would give you mixed feelings like it did to her. She basically is saying that we can never really go back to our old childhood places because nothing stays the same.
Some cities can totally change drastically and lose its character like Sacramento. At first, Sacramento was, “no more than an adobe enclosure, Sutter’s Fort, standing alone on the prairie; cut off from San Francisco and the sea by the Coast Range and from the rest of the continent by the Sierra Nevada, the Sacramento Valley was then a true sea of grass, grass so high a man riding into it could tie it across his saddle” (Didion 55). According to Didion, before Sacramento changed, it was a very peaceful and quiet place. Isolated from the outside world, many can find peace and tranquility in Sacramento. However, this all changed when the gold rush occurred in the Sierra foothills. People came to Sacramento, especially from Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, and soon the city became a town, a rich farm town.
According to Didion, Sacramento had changed and that, “What happened was that Sacramento woke up to the fact that the outside world was moving in, fast and hard. At the moment of its waking Sacramento lost, for better of for worse, its character” (55). With all the changes that are happening to the city, it is no longer what it used to be....

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