The Pacific Has No Memory

Los Angeles was my home for 25 years. In 2024 I moved to Antwerp with my family, but as fate would have it, we flew to L.A. for a visit on January 8th, 2025. The sky over the Palisades was already smudged black, homes and histories evaporating into the quiet air.

Over that week we had our own scares with evacuations, felt the fear and surreal dread that was everywhere in the city. We spent time with friends, hearing their hushed stories of how they had lost everything. I will never forget the look in their eyes — shocked, untethered. I think there is something truly unique about losing one’s world to a fire: it burns everything, completely and utterly. There is literally nothing left to mourn.

The Pacific Has No Memory takes its title from a line in one of my favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption. In it, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) dreams of a life near the ocean where his past is a memory of a memory, distant and liquid - a place where the blue of the Pacific will give him a chance to start new, reborn. I hope the same for all who lost so much in those terrible fires.

© Eric Whitacre 2025