I completely agree. I recently moved to San Francisco from Iowa. The city itself is truly shocking. I find myself looking back on life in Iowa quite frequently,

I completely agree. I recently moved to San Francisco from Iowa. The city itself is truly shocking. I find myself looking back on life in Iowa quite frequently, and I think of it very similarly to this Nabokov quote: a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside The smells, the noise, the mental deterioration. The shear amount of people that just resign to the world in big cities---and San Francisco in particular---is more than an order of magnitude greater than anything you'll find east of the Rockies and west of Chicago.