on keeping a notebook

“perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but i do see it; i think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends…i have already lost touch with a couple of people i used to be…the other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. she was always a good deal of trouble, and i suspect she will reappear when i least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories i do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.” – joan didion

(art by ghada amer)

didion says: california of my childhood

“all that is constant about the california of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.” – notes from a native daughter

slouching towards bethlehem

“how many miles to babylon?” she asks.

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”

so begins joan didion’s essay on new york, youth, and that terrifying business of growing up. i really am convinced that her essay is the literary soulmate of j.d. salinger’s catcher in the rye, and regardless of political affiliations or dietary restrictions, every single twenty something wandering soul should read up.

i must have written about this essay a while back, but that really is not the point. the point is that her essay is the kind of writing that, upon reading it, makes you wish that the author was your best friend. and that you could pour over the text all night long, revisiting quotes, acting out impressions, and generally falling deep deep deeply in love with all things worth falling deep deep deeply in love with.

she continues on with this declaration of love:

“I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.”

and more portraits of the city that consumed her youth:

“I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month….New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”

and i guess in this state of well, stasis, as i fall from one grace to another, as i try my luck at charting my own path to happinness, i find myself bonding with that 27 years old joan who considered making a living a game, with “arbitrary but quite inflexible rules.” as i marvel at friends with matching furniture and spice collections, didion’s confession, “i never bought any furniture in new york,” somehow sounds uncannily like my own. this odd need to pare down my belongings to fit into a single suit case. the want not to be tied down by anything – let alone furniture – but the parallel want for signs of stability.

and when i read about her hanging a map of sacramento county to “remind [her] of who [she] was,” i take one glance at my herbivore poster and laugh.

and when she writes:

“I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.”

and it is as if i am looking into a mirror. and as afternoons fade into night, i take the darkness in the crescent of my arms, and wander off, in search of my bethlehem.

a didion sunday

today, this article posted by kyle reminded me of joan didion and her illuminating prose.

in search of the link of that essay i read a while ago, i entered “didion” into my gmail search box, and found an old email i had sent to a friend with the following quote:

“… Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts…. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds….”

i am in love with you, joan didion.

more thoughts to come when i am not watching football on tv while applying to jobs. jobjobjobjobjobs.