Sick Sad World, Etc.

About a month or so ago, I stumbled across a box of books in the lobby of a friend's apartment building. It was there that I found two books by Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. I had first read Didion during my Freshman year of college, in an English class that focused on Post-modern literature. We read the essay "John Wayne: A Love Song." Out of the many books and essays I read in that class, Didion stuck out the most to me. I just loved the detail of her writing, her honesty, and her capture of the cultural, political, and social atmosphere of the 60s and 70s in America.

Recently, I've had time to read both collections of essays. Her writing has struck me on both a personal and academic level. Primarily in my Media Studies: Ideas class, with her descriptions on culture industry and the interpretations of it.

From The White Album:

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea...We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."

I cannot understand why someone would give away collections of her essays. At the same time, whoever did it, I thank you, as those books have now taken a permanent residence on my bookshelf.