This Is A Race: "TIME IS THE SCHOOL IN WHICH WE LEARN...

...TIME IS THE FIRE IN WHICH WE BURN."

-Delmore Schwartz

The above is a quote that authour JOAN DIDION uses in her book THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING. I have never before read a book so quickly. I finished it in just over 24 hours as well as working, going to the gym, cooking, cleaning, and so on. That is not to say it is an easy read, or rather a light one.

The book is a non-fictional account of the one year period in Didion's life when her daughter, Quintana, is suddenly and severely taken by pneumonia and several other conditions on Christmas Day. Five days after Quintana was taken to the hospital and subsequently put into a medically induced coma, Didion and her husband John return to their New York apartment and have just sat down to dinner when John suddenly dies of a heart attack.

This is revealed within the first few pages. The rest of the book follows Joan's own account of grief and mourning for the one year period after her husband's death. Like a hybrid of A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS, STONE ANGEL, and WIT, the authour unleashes her stream of consciousness in what she describes as the vortexes she experienced when one memory would trigger another in a spiral of nostalgia. She quotes others frequently, as one would listen to a song that suddenly took on meaning after a break-up, and does not avoid using brand names or shy away from admitting that she ate at McDonald's.

The section that summed up the book for me most succinctly was one in which she quoted an article about Stephen Hawking that she clipped out of a magazine not understanding why it was so significant. The article basically stated that Hawking was going back on his own theory that any matter that entered a black hole could never be recovered - in effect that one could never know the physical make-up of the star that collapsed on itself and caused the black hole. Later, the importance of the article comes to Didion as she stands on an escalator. She described her obsession with the events leading up to John's death as her attempt to "reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star."

She recounts and recounts the events before John's death as if it would be possible to bring him back, or to have been able to anticipate his death. I have never experienced grief or completely lost connection with anyone I love because of death (and Didion herself recounts what she remembers thinking in her youth before she had experienced grief and what she anticipated it being and the feelings she expected to have when she did finally encounter this pain), but I certainly understand the scrutiny of the past. She speaks of self-pity and how our awareness of it causes us to scorn our pain and ourselves for feeling it, thus burying emotion in favour of the comfort of others and in the idea that death is a weakness and is caused by our fault alone. She recalls Freud in a theory about her having to recount everything she can about her dead husband in order to let those emotions dissipate.

"I love you more than one more day" each member of the family says throughout the book. One more day always seems ideal doesn't it? It seems the thing that will fix everything, and to love more than that is infinite.

I swear that when I am ready to leave my career for the right reasons, I will become a writer.

Didion remembers an event involving John, and thinks that at that point, though neither of them were aware, he had only 120 hours left to live. She wonders briefly how John would have spent his last 120 hours. I wondered how I would spend mine, what would I do if 7200 minutes asked me to leave one at a time.

I would write. I would write down as much as I could remember about everything that was important to me for some reason or another. A list of a thousand thoughts, but no feelings attached to them. That way you could have your own experience of what my mind saw. I would not go into great detail, for if there were people involved in that memory they too would remember, and I would not only write about memories people knew about. I would spend all my credit on dinner for my family and a very select few friends, estranged and still present. I would not be sad, and I would not tell them that I was dying until the very last moment, so that the dinner would not be tainted with the smell of death, and so that paramedics would not cut me open in plain view, and I would hand them each a list. It would start like this:

I remember whales at the zoo
I remember a Rice Krispies Square covered in sprinkles on a yellow plate
I remember backscratches
I remember Pogos and Doritos
I remember Wonderland
I remember Molson
I remember kissing you aux Champs Elysees as I sang "Lady in Red"
I remember you kissing me on a dock under stars
I remember Cheerios and Bowie

And on it would go, with each of you, until you wrote your own lists.

I'll finish off with one final quote from the book:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

Labels: BOOKS MOVIES AND OTHER CULTURALISTICALITIES, DEATH AND DRAMA, DESPERATE AND SAD

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