Magical Thinking

I've just read The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion. It's about grieving and coping and going a little crazy (just part of the grieving) the year after her husband died. Fascinating and beautifully written book. In it is a passage about geology that relates to "the grand indifference of the stars" in Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, which I am still reading, mentioned in a past blog entry.

Here's Didion:

"As a child I thought a great deal about meaninglessness, which seemed at the time the most prominent negative feature on the horizon. After a few years of failing to find meaning in the more commonly recommended venues I learned that I could find it in geology, so I did. This in turn enabled me to find meaning in the Episcopal litany, most acutely in the words as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, which I interpreted as a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away. I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the scheme could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No one was watching me. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end."

This gets at my sense of things, how science and whatever the soul is co-exist. What is, is, as the Buddhists say. And as I say, frequently, in conversation.

Sometimes with myself. What a comfort to read, in this Paris Review interview, that Joan Didion is, essentially, talking to herself, too! "Are you conscious of the reader as you write?" asks the interviewer, Linda Kuehl. "Do you write listening to the reader listening to you?"

"Obviously I listen to the reader," Didion answers, in her usual smart, blunt way, "but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself."

Thanks to Joan Didion for her acute insights and to Facebook for "talking to Myself...."