Warm personal memory, not destruction data, conveys a city’s meaning to outsiders

Evidence

The earthquake facts did not bother Will. All he knew was that his beloved city at the Golden Gate was broken and burning. He and his brother Wallace (also a writer) had been happy there in the fleecy fog that rolled in, of afternoons, down to Van Ness Avenue; they had feasted joyously at the Poodle Dog in its palmy days; they had jinked with the Bohemians. Will poured out his heart in a “story” that interpreted the very essence of his city. People that had never been there felt that they, too, had leaned against a lamppost on Market Street, and had idled in the picturesque Chinese quarter around Grant Avenue. They saw, felt, and heard—and lamented the loss of something that had instantly become theirs. This was interpretation : the revelation of the soul of a city. It was based upon fact, but they were not the facts of the earthquake destruction. — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 185

Categorization

• SEED: The contrast between Ochs’s colorless Times and the Sun’s interpretation-as-love for San Francisco is a ready-made essay frame for any interpretive-writing piece.
• XREF: connects to: Dates gain meaning only when grouped with the contemporaneous world — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 201