Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

by Joan Didion

suicide pacts sealed in drive-ins.

so hot that August comes on not like a month but like an affliction;

which is to be paralyzed by a past no longer relevant.

They will have lost the real past and gained a manufactured one,

but about the things we lose and the promises we break as we grow older;

too often frightened of migraine and failure and the days getting shorter,

but I do remember that I made no connection between that Hawaii and the Hawaii of December 7, 1941.

It is hard to remember what we came to remember.

“We need more attention to shaping and molding the product.” The product is the place they live.

But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions,

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

monuments to something beyond themselves;

où sont les croquet wickets d’antan.

reminders “of the peculiarly awkward vengeances of affronted proportion and discretion.”

“Happiness” is, after all, a consumption ethic,

swimming in golden light, sybaritic air, a deeply romantic place.

a sense not of how prettily money can be spent but of how harshly money is made,

pork-belly futures.

We went to get away from ourselves,

The road shimmers. The eyes want to close.

but after dinner one could lie in a hammock on the terrace and listen to the fountains and the sea.

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension.

given over to whatever it is in the air.

to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn the way it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964.

Ralph’s Market

“He . . . is . . . also . . . a . . . fag,”

Twin

The oral history of Los Angeles is written in piano bars.

“Moon River,”

My fave! <3

“Mountain Greenery.” “There’s a Small Hotel” and “This Is N...

“The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.”

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.

I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.

and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.

It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York.

the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyon...

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach.

Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about.

I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them.

so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited.

Smells, of course, are notorious memory stimuli,

the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings

all the sweet promises of money and summer.

or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always.

I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not,

had never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year.

and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around