Journals, 1942:

“Odd, I can’t breath in this climate.  The air is totally odorless, morning and evening, in both house and garden.  There are no seasons here.  It has been part of my morning routine to lean out of the window and breathe in fresh air; I have cut this out of my routine here.  There is neither smoke nor the smell of grass to be had, the plants seems to me like twigs we used to plant in the sand as children.  After ten minutes their leaves were dangling limply.  You keep wondering if they might cut off the water, even here, and what then? Occasionally, especially in the car going to Beverly Hills, I get something like a whiff of landscape, which ‘really’ seems attractive; gentle lines of hills, lemon thickets, a Californian oak, even one or other of the filling -stations can actually be rather amusing; but all this lies behind plate glass, and I involuntarily look at each hill or lemon tree for a little price tag.  You look for these price tags on people too.”

“Remarkable how in this place a universally depraving, cheap prettiness prevents people from living in a halfway cultivated fashion, i.e. living with dignity.  In my garden-house in Utting, and even under my Danish thatched roof, it was possible to browse over the bellum gallicum in the morning.  Here it would be utter snobbery.”