Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

by Joan Didion

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes.

So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences.

The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal.

Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.”

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.

I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.

We went to get away from ourselves, and the way to do that is to drive,