Modern Living: CALIFORNIA: A State of Excitement

IF an earthquake were somehow to tear California off the continent and set it afloat in the sea, the island state might survive. But could the rest of the U.S.? California is virtually a nation unto itself, but it holds a strange hope, a sense of excitement—and some terror—for Americans. As most of them see it, the good, godless, gregarious pursuit of pleasure is what California is all about. The citizens of lotusland seem forever to be lolling around swimming pools, sautéing in the sun, packing across the Sierra, frolicking nude on the beaches, getting taller each year, plucking money off the trees, romping around topless, tramping through the redwoods and—when they stop to catch their breath—preening themselves on-camera before the rest of an envious world. "I have seen the future," says the newly returned visitor from California, "and it plays."

It is widely believed that this El Dorado is the mirror of America as it will become, or at least the hothouse for its most rousing fads, fashions, trends and ideas. California clothes, architecture, arts, business ventures, topless/bottomless, parks, table wines, liberated leisure styles, cults, think tanks and Disneylands seem to be spreading everywhere. California's people have created their own atmosphere, like astronauts. Yet it could be that the state is not really so different from the rest of the U.S. as it seems: that it is, in fact, a microcosm of modern American life, with all its problems and promises—only vastly exaggerated.

In California everything seems intensified to the point of excess. If excellence and beauty are nowhere more excellent and beautiful than in California, it is also true that nowhere else is the bad so ugly and the ugly so bad. It is full of dramatic contrasts, but what is the essence behind them? It is changing at a dizzying rate, but where are the changes taking it? What is it that people do to California—or California to them? One way to find out is to be born there. Another is to play a latter-day Candide—an innocent in the West of all possible worlds. TIME Correspondent Tim Tyler, 28, born in New York City and based in Los Angeles for the past 22 months, played that role recently. In effect, Tyler became a camera, zooming in on the human-natural scene, searching for something like the soul of the state. His report: