Called Out of Darkness Page 0,46

of history that was beyond my grasp.

As for what was going on around me - the feminist movement, the rise of the hippies, the transformation of the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco (where I happened to live), the Vietnam War protests - I ignored these things pretty much. They didn't interest me, per se. I had no perspective on the emancipation of women or how key it was to the conditions of my own daily life. I couldn't see how rapidly it was advancing. I think I ignored militant feminism because it was too painful for me to become involved in the fray.

Also there was no way that a young person like me, with such limited mental tools, could grasp that we were in fact experiencing one of the most tumultuous and significant times in world history.

I had no sense then that I'd been born into a world of rampant social experiment, and I did not see the world-transforming significance of the emancipation of women, and the liberation of gays.

I was too focused on the past.

As for the civil rights movement, I missed it. I'd left the South before it started; and I was in California almost the entire time that the key court decisions were made. Thousands of young people were being radicalized by their participation in this movement. I wasn't aware of it. I was deep into my timeless studies, often experiencing profound insights into social situations for which I had little or no continuous context.

But I'm not sure many other people struggling through the 1960s and 1970s realized how unique were the changes that we saw.

Assumptions about race and gender were being thrown out the window.

The Western family was being entirely reconfigured.

Women had attained more legal rights and privileges in ten years than they had in seven thousand years before. Re-spectable men and women lived together out of wedlock.

No-fault divorce came into existence. Contraceptive devices and drugs were readily available. The prosecution of rape as a crime underwent a transformation, in which the victim was no longer on trial, but the perpetrator.

The Vietnam War polarized the country. Illegal drugs spread from the campus elites to the middle classes and to the working classes, and ultimately to the criminal classes.

Millions of women not only had access to more jobs than ever before, but discovered they had to work for a living, whether they wanted to or not, and the "stay-at-home wife" became a rare being, along with the husband willing to support her.

All this was simply too vast, too swift, too inexorable for people to comprehend. Social and economic forces were too intermingled with the voices of protest or the prophets of social justice. I saw life transformed for millions of Americans, out of the corner of my eye.

Meantime, my early years in San Francisco were rich years. Foreign films were the rage, which meant continued exposure to the work of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Antonioni, Bunuel, and Truffaut. San Francisco has marvelous small theaters in which we saw the plays of Sartre and Camus. All this educated me in ways that books could not.

And around me, as ever, were good people, conscientious people, secular people who on principle wanted to make our world a better world - for the black person, for the woman, for the poor. I can't emphasize this enough: in San Francisco and later in Berkeley, I saw secular humanism as something beautiful and vigorous and brave. And looking back on it, I still see it in that way.

The great hippie revolution occurred as I was finishing my undergraduate years, and I found myself in the thick of it, living as we did one-half block off Haight Street in an apartment house that came to include the famous Free Clinic of the neighborhood.

Friends and relatives trooped through our apartment, marveling at the paintings on the walls, at Stan's poems hanging over his typewriter, at our intense and high-pitched intellectual life amid piles of books and sometime domestic confusion, a world in which Stan and I pounded away on our separate typewriters or argued furiously about philosophy and literature, no matter who might be there to witness the screaming and get upset.

People all around us were discussing the ideas of Timothy Leary, the effects of LSD, the joy of being a dropout artist.

Marijuana smoke was thick in the air. It was the incense of the church of psychedelic transformation. People took carefully structured LSD trips with others who had experienced the drug, acting as protective "guides."