Celebrate through literature.
From a piece on Melville House Books' site...
Today, San Francisco marks The Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th birthday with a series of tributes, festivals, and readings.
The suspension bridge is known across the globe for its grand towers and sweeping beauty, but also for its place in popular culture, including literature.
It would take a great deal of research to qualify just how many times, and in which stories, essays, poems, and novels the bridge is mentioned. But for the purposes of today’s MobyLives post, here are some examples that quickly call to mind the many sides of the Golden Gate.
+ From Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland:
Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge represents a transition, in the metaphysics of the region, there to be felt even by travelers unwary as Zoyd. When the busful of northbound hippies first caught sight of it, just at sundown as the fog was pouring in, the towers and cables ascending into pale gold otherworldly billows, you heard a lot of ”Wow,” and ”Beautiful,” though Zoyd only found it beautiful the way a firearm is, because of the bad dream unreleased inside it, in this case the brute simplicity of height, the finality of what swept below relentlessly out to sea. They rose into the strange gold smothering, visibility down to half a car length. . . .
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