Didion's bible
"?the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable 'I' ", wrote Joan Didion in her 1969 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The book established her as an important American writer. In an observation that bloggers might do well to keep in mind, Didion recounts in Slouching Towards Bethlehem that she kept a notebook not so much to much to collect facts but feelings, "an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker" and sometimes not for her. Here's the key passage:
"I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overhead in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillion (one middle-aged man who shows his hat-check to another says, "That's my old football number"); impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy ("Mr. Acapulco") Stauffer; careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside."
If forced to pick a favourite sentence from Didion's notebook, I'd opt for: "I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be?"
