Bon Voyage Joan Didion

[stilltrucking]

OPINION
GUEST ESSAY

Didion’s Prophetic Eye on America
Dec. 24, 2021

Once again, we are living in times defined by chaos and uncertainty, and what Didion called “the jitters” are settling in again, as we worry about Covid and climate change and police brutality and mass shootings at schools.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/24/opin ... books.html

[stilltrucking]

a sorceress of syntax, with a cadence to her words and a music to her paragraphs that were utterly spellbinding.

“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 other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.”

The Radical Transparency of Joan Didion