2026-04-10
29 分钟Last weekend, I was standing on a bluff above the ocean, and I felt one of my very favorite feelings.
It's this feeling that I love so much that I have come to realize that I tell these stories here on the Memory Palace.
Largely because I'm chasing that feeling, maybe trying to conjure in others, too.
It's a thing that happens to me, and honestly, maybe only me.
You may not relate to this at all.
But sometimes I'm flooded with this sense of the past and the present overlaying on top of each other in the same space.
I'm suddenly aware of myself there in the present moment as just one person living one life in the flow of time.
It is heady and kind of dorky.
But I love it so much.
It happens most often when I am returning to a place,
as I did on this particular weekend, on this particular bluff in Rancho Palos Verdes,
a town on the Southern California coast.
And so there, on this perfect California day,
looking down and out and across the water from up there on this bluff, I had both a sense of that place's history.
About how the resort where we were staying was once an amusement park called Marineland and was there for decades
until SeaWorld, its main competitor a couple hours down the road in San Diego,
was denied a permit from the United States government to capture any more live orcas.
And so they went to Marineland and bought not just both the orcas that it had on display at the park,
but the whole park along with it and shut it down.
And they thought about how the hills and the fields around that spot