Sublime

Didion is saying that the horror show is art imitating life, the way good art always does. It represents what she calls ‘our actual experience’.

Finding one’s role at seventeen is problem enough, without being handed somebody else’s script.

Two cords of stacked wood had not kept the woman in the house across Marlboro Street from becoming a widow at dinner.

She’s wearing a pistachio Ultrasuede shift that’s probably too fancy for this affair, though McAnnis suspects that Susan Burr stopped caring long ago about the looks she elicits from other women.

If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die?

This perfect recycling tended to present itself, in the narcosis of the event, as a model for the rest: like American political life itself, and like the printed and transmitted images on which that life depended. This was a world with no half-life. It was understood that what was said here would go on the wire and vanish.