Magical Thinking

November 27, 2005

I’ve just finished Joan Didion’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking , which won a Pulitzer Prize this year. Didion’s book recounts the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the simultaneous, grave health problems of her daughter, Quintana. Here’s why she wrote the book: “This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.” [7]

As I was reading Didion, a passage came to mind from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, volume 7 (Time Regained). Here’s the narrator, also known as Marcel: “In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps have never perceived in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity, the contrary also being true, at least to a certain extent, for the difference between the two texts may sometimes be imputed less to the author than to the reader. Besides, the book may be too learned, too obscure for a simple reader, and may therefore present to him a clouded glass through which he cannot read. …”

Or would have perhaps forgotten. Why do we read such books? Back to Kafka’s Axe. To break open the frozen sea of amnesia inside us. I remember several weeks after Mev died, friends Trish Curtis and Mike Goeke took me to spot the eagles up by the river and on the way home Trish said that someday I might miss the intense feelings re: Mev because right then I was still feeling her closely. And Didion’s book, which brought tears to my eyes in spots, helped me to remember, to connect, to think back to those days with Mev, our marriage, the way we did things. Here’s a list of excerpts from the book that banged me between the eyes…

… and ran the dishwater and filled our (I could not yet think my) otherwise empty house even after… [5]

There was nothing I did not discuss with John. Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other’s voices. I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted. [16]

What I remember about the apartment the night I came home alone from New York Hospital was its silence. [17]

… through the winter and spring there had been occasion on which I was incapable of thinking rationally. [35]

In times of trouble, I had been training since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. [44]

Their little mantra: “I love you more than even one more day,” an Audrey Hepburn line. [68]

I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs. I wanted to scream. I wanted him back. [75]

“Third nerve” and “brainstem” were words that I would hear more often than I wanted to during the weeks to come. [95]

I had no answers. I had no prognosis. I did not know how this had happened. [99]

I would lie down. I would watch the local news. I would stand in the shower for twenty minutes and go out to dinner. [116]

What would I give to be able to discuss this with John? [146]

I did not believe in the resurrection of the body. [149]

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,” Philippe Aries wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. “But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.” [192]

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know. [196]

It was the first piece I had written since 1963 that he did not read in draft form and tell me what was wrong, what was needed, how to bring it up here, take it down there. [213]