Where It All Goes Down
Berkeley, California, late 1960s
You might never expect a gas station to serve as the main setting of a novel, but in this novel it is… and it's quite a clear metaphor. Back in the 1960s, it was more common to have an attendant run out and wash your windows and pump your gas when you drove up to a gas station, so basically, you were getting serviced, tuned up, fixed, and repaired.
And that's exactly what Socrates, the attendant of the station in the novel, does to Dan.
They begin his training at night. Dan starts off in the book with only his day-time, ordinary, conventional life as a college student: the known world beneath the sun, where everyone plays by ordinary U.S. rules of consumerism, unhealthy food, and insistence on finding (or buying) purpose, meaning, and goals.
But the night brings Dan to Socrates and his alternate world of the peaceful warrior's way: meditation, calm, etc. So it's literally a night-and-day difference between the two worlds. Dan struggles to pick which of the two paths he'll follow. Soon enough, he's Socrates' loyal student, and by then, they're meeting in the daylight too. So the peaceful warrior's way begins to become 24/7 for Dan.
With one exception, those are the two major places in the novel—the gas station and college—though there are a few other surrounding spots, too, such as Tilden Park where Socrates, Dan, and Joy picnic. So what's the exception?
Ah, that's the mountains. The Sierra Nevada range is where Dan takes off to for his final chance at discovering unreasonable happiness. So in the Sierra Nevada we have trees, wilderness, a cave—quite different from the urban setting we've seen before in the book. Cities are population centers, which induces conformity of thought; mountains are out in the middle of nowhere: Dan, alongside Socrates, can pursue truth in two-player solitude.
Many novels, such as those of Faulkner and Dickens, express a great deal about how social and historical forces exert so much control over our lives, but we get the opposite view in Way of the Peaceful Warrior. This is a self-help book about how you can be happy. Rise above your circumstances, Socrates tells Dan, and therefore us. Don't be bound by the where and when of your birth. You can do it!
The setting of Berkely and the late 1960s, then, is in a way pretty irrelevant to the novel and its philosophy. The anti-war and hippie movements that were big in Berkeley at the time are never mentioned, for example. In short, historical forces, social and political causes, and other major elements of setting are all out of the picture.