Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
Saved by Alex Dobrenko and
Seeenough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning whenthe world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only goingthrough 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 itwill all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passageback to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevatorsand at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows hishat check to another and says, “That’s my old football number”); impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy(“Mr. Acapulco”) Stauffer; careful aperçus1 about tennis bums andfailed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taughtme a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. ScottFitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) byasking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting roomon the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it wassnowing outside.
Saved by Alex Dobrenko and
Finding one’s role at seventeen is problem enough, without being handed somebody else’s script.
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 corespondent. If they
... See moreAnd then I recognized it: it was a tone reflecting the idolatry of the rich that so often accompanies the democratization of things, the flattening out.
In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook” [4], Joan Didion warned that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” She added: “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 th
... See more