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in the midst of disaster. Like them, McAdie implied that this demeanor was
more a primal instinct than a product of scientific education. Indeed, he
hinted that Muir's qualities as an observer were precisely those that were
missing from the science of his day—he was not just “accurate,” but also
“eloquent,” expressive not only of “what the eye beheld,” but also of what
he managed “to feel.” In this way, even the most “scientific” accounts of the
earthquake raised questions about the nature and origins of acute percep-
tion in the face of an elemental catastrophe.
Scientists were not alone in staking a claim to an alert, expansive, and
impersonal perspective on the 1906 earthquake. the event seemed custom
made for youth with “literary aspirations” like the writer Kathleen norris.
Like five of her young literary friends, norris experienced the earthquake as
an “unmitigated delight.” “How I wish that to every life there might come,
if once only, such days of change and freedom, so deep and intoxicating a
draught of realities, after all the artificialities of civilization and society.”
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On the afternoon of 19 April, she and her friends sent off their first stories of
the disaster: “We realized that here was our golden opportunity, and we lost
no time.”
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the writer Gertrude Atherton, who lost her home in the fire, like-
wise seized on the earthquake as a literary windfall.
Harper's Weekly
soon
quoted her advice that there was “no better 'cure'” than an earthquake “for
those that live where nature has practically forgotten them.”
the earthquake
reappeared in Atherton's novel
Sisters-in-Law,
which opens with a young girl
out alone after midnight for the first time. the anticipated scene of sexual
awakening turns into quite a different form of liberation:
Alexina was a child of California and knew what was coming. She barely had
time to brace herself when she saw the sleeping city jar as if struck by a sudden
squall, and with the invisible storm came a loud menacing roar of impris-
oned forces making a concerted rush for freedom. She threw her arms about
one of the trees, but it was bending and groaning with an accent of fear, a
tribute it would have scorned to offer the mighty winds of the Pacific. Alexina
sprang clear of it and unable to keep her feet sat down on the bouncing earth.
then she remembered that it was a rigid convention among real Californians
to treat an earthquake as a joke, and began to laugh. there was nothing hys-
terical in this perfunctory tribute to the lesser tradition and it immediately
restored her courage. Moreover, the curiosity she felt for all phases of life,
psychical and physical, and her naïve delight in everything that savored of
experience, caused her to stare down upon the city now tossing and heaving
like the sea in a hurricane, with an almost impersonal interest.
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