“Balenciaga momma, I know you heard about her. Spoil me in Prada, I’m worth every dollar. The one you made, could keep ‘em. I need Chrissy Teigen, know a bad bitch when I see one. Tell Rih-Rih I need a threesome. I’m his favorite type of chick, boujee, bad, and thick. I could buy designer, but this Fashion Nova fit all that ass.”
The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick The Silver Locusts, Ray Bradbury
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.
“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.” - Sylvia Plath
I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.-Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017)
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still therein the texture of the thing.”
—The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 476. Joan Didion
“You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the colour blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes— the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.”
Social problems present themselves to many of these people in terms of a scenario, in which, once certain key scenes are licked (the confrontation on the courthouse steps, the revelation that the opposition leader has an anti-Semitic past, the presentation of the bill of particulars to the President, a Henry Fonda cameo), the plot will proceed inexorably to an upbeat fade. Marlon Brando does not, in a well-plotted motion picture, picket San Quentin in vain: what we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention.
We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate. To have assumed that particular fate so early was the peculiarity of my generation. I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults. That most of us have found adulthood just as morally ambiguous as we expected it to be falls perhaps into the category of prophecies self-fulfilled: I am simply not sure.
joan didions preface to slouching towards bethlehem
[text id: (underlined) This book is called Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poems which appears two pages back have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there. […] the only images against which much of what i was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.]
“I had learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them.”
…quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, 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.
In light of her death, I think we should all aspire to create the same amount of chaos, enlightenment, and beauty that Joan Didion did in her 87 beautiful years on Earth. Wherever, if at all, you are now, I miss you Joan <3
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