There are no night life, strip-mall development or upscale boutiques.
Fanning Island is a simple story of life stripped of the progenitive illusion, of men in chains condemned to death.
"I spent two years of my life, stripping 100 years of paint off my windows," he said.
Wrenched out of ordinary life, stripped of many constitutional rights and placed in an unforgiving environment, Heart Mountain's inhabitants created an alternative universe.
Mr. Pare's gift is to show us what happens when those visions are tested in everyday life, stripped of their original theoretical baggage.
Cancer may be short-sighted, but it is life stripped raw and caterwauling, life determined to divide at all costs, and to go back to the womb, and to be born all over again.
The role is dutifully spiritual, the penal equivalent of Job, as if a man who has had two decades of his life stripped away is expected to have achieved a monastic serenity about it all.
Dinner that night took us down to the Mission District, the newly trendy working-class area crisscrossed with night life strips and sidewalks full of scruffy street people and chic young things.
"There's something about the feeling you get when you have 12 women from different walks of life stripping ourselves naked and allowing your innermost insecurities to come out," she said.
A time of recession and transition — when the smoke screen generated by years of frantic getting and spending suddenly evaporates — is perhaps exactly the time to contemplate life stripped down to its naked essentials, or what Shakespeare's Lear called "unaccommodated man".
While fishing in the sea, Monbiot recounts gladly, "My mind blew empty"; while rafting down the Colorado river, Solnit reports, "The flow of water seemed like the flow of time, as though I had left behind the particulars of my life to step into life itself"; star-gazing in Africa, Dee rhapsodises about "the oldness of the view, the way looking up shreds your life, strips it back".
