Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking just arrived via mail. I've started it already and it is compelling but makes me wonder if I am merely curious, or voyeuristic and possibly masochistic. I hope that reading about her losses is helpful in preparing for any which may lie in wait in my future. I can tell already why it won the National Book Award. Her words about California strike me as poignantly true.
Many people in the East (or "back East," as they say inCalifornia, although not in LaScala or Ernie's) do not believe this. They
have been to Los Angeles or to San Francisco, have driven through a giant
redwood and have seen the Pacific, glazed by the afternoon sun off Big Sur, and
they naturally tend to believe that they have in fact been to California.
They have not been, and they probably never will be, for it is a longer and in
many ways a more difficult trip than they might want to undertake, one of those
trips on which the destination flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever
receding, ever diminishing... California is a place in which a boom mentality
and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension: in which the mind is
troubled by some uried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work
here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky is where we run out of
continent. Joan Didion
The photograph of Morro Rock is from a book entitled California the Beautiful. The texts accompanying the pictures were selected by Peter Beren . Galen Rowell (1940-2002) took all the photographs in the book and they are breathtaking. The jacket blurb says he was the successor (albeit with color) to Ansel Adams. No argument here.
2 comments:
Mmm, gorgeous photo. I hear the book, in the words of my step-grandmother, "is a bit of a downer." Ha ha! But lovely writing.
I read it after my Dad died and found it very helpful. Amazed at the courage Joan had in getting through what she had to with both husband and daughter.
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