year magical thinking joan didion quotes

#Year magical thinking joan didion quotes mods#

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#Year magical thinking joan didion quotes mods#

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After Dunne's death, this feeling is heightened to a painful degree and Didion is forced to confront 'the experience of meaninglessness itself'. She feels that narrative has broken down, that it is impossible to find meaning in these events. ' In, Didion reflects on the deaths that became emblematic of the time: JFK's, Sharon Tate's, Jim Morrison's.

'We cannot know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning. Grief, says Didion, is not what we expect it to be. There was nothing she did not discuss with him. She and Dunne had worked together as writers for 40 years. She describes this process as 'the vortex': being sucked back into the past to compulsively relive events as if it might be possible to change their course or reverse time through sheer mental effort. Wherever she goes, she comes across places that remind her of times with John and Quintana. She is also assailed by memories and brilliantly traces the paths of her thoughts as one memory triggers another and then another. cummings, Matthew Arnold, Auden - to give voice to her grief, it is surprising that she doesn't also quote from the other John Donne, who writes so exquisitely on love and death.) Didion gives away some of his clothes but cannot part with his shoes because he will need them when he comes back she cannot read the obituaries because she feels she has misled people into believing he is dead.ĭidion is appalled that she had not sufficiently appreciated the danger he was in and how it weighed upon him. (Given her impulse to turn to poetry - Shakespeare, Hopkins, e.e. This is the 'magical thinking' of the title, the irrational conviction that Dunne's death can be undone. In effect, Didion puts herself on the couch in order to expose the workings of the bereaved mind: the irrational or 'magical' thinking characteristic of mourning.Īs Didion recalls the facts of her husband's death - one moment he was sitting at the dinner table, alive and talking, the next moment he was dead - she finds herself compelled to go over and over the event, trying to get the sequence right, trying to get a fix on what happened and trying to rewrite the ending. But this would be to misunderstand the emotional force and acuity of Didion's intellectual insights, particularly her ability to observe and analyse her own grief with the same hyper-attentiveness that she applies to the people and social events she writes about in her journalism.