Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

The first section of this collection of Didion's essays read to me like breezy, if intelligent, essays of very little consequence. I'll be honest, I wasn't quite bowled over by them. Then I kept reading. I can only describe the experience as intellectually thrilling. Didion is a masterful writer and the way she points her mind at subjects small and large is overwhelming. Just take the end of her essay On Morality and see how insightful it is for our current (November 10th, 2020) circumstances, politically:

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing-beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what is "evil." I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of "morality" seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to "believe" in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with "morality." Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

1) "I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone's press agent. (This precludes doing pieces on most actors, a bonus in itself.) I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

2) "The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.
It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves 'hippies.' When I first went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967 I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile, and made a few friends."

3) "Why do I keep a notebook at all? [...] The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. 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."

4) "The oral history of Los Angeles is written in piano bars. 'Moon River,' the piano player always plays, and 'Mountain Greenery.' 'There's a Small Hotel' and 'This Is Not the First Time.' People talk to each other, tell each other about their first wives and last husbands. 'Stay funny,' they tell each other, and 'This is to die over.' A construction man talks to an unemployed screenwriter who is celebrating, alone, his tenth wedding anniversary. The construction man is on a job in Montecito: 'Up in Montecito,' he says, 'they got one square mile with 135 millionaires.'
'Putrescence,' the writer says.
'That's all you got to say about it?'
'Don't read me wrong, I think Santa Barbara's one of the most---Christ, the most---beautiful places in the world, but it's a beautiful place that contains a...putrescence. They just live on their putrescent millions.'
'So give me putrescent.'
'No, no,' the writer says. 'I just happen to think millionaires have some sort of lacking in their...in their elasticity.'
A drunk requests 'The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.' The piano player says he doesn't know it. 'Where'd you learn to play the piano?' the drunk asks. 'I got two degrees,' the piano player says. 'One in musical education.' I go to a coin telephone and call a friend in New York. 'Where are you?' he says. 'In a piano bar in Encino,' I say. 'Why?' he says. 'Why not,' I say.'"