Me and Joan

I've probably read close to 1000 pages of Joan Didion's nonfiction work (which, doing the math, is not a great proportion), but it was only today that I found the piece with which I most closely identified.

"On The Morning After The Sixties" ends like this: "If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending." Reading just this sentence it would be easy to assume Didion was talking about 60's foolishness, saying a giant ba-hum-bug to the 60's - or, really, the young - change-the-world mentality, but that is not the subject of Didion's essay. Instead, she's talking about the peculiar, lost mentality of a peculiar, lost generation - one nestled uncomfortably in the comfortable 50's. Without saving you the necessity of reading the essay (not to mention ease - the thing is, like much of her most stunning work, under 4 pages long), I'll say it evokes a time for her that is like its titular morning, a time of her youth in which the isolation of man's long-term situation was an assumption, a time for which the Lost Generation was a foundation of thought.

It's interesting, as a person raised in the 90's, to think that this mentality even had room to exist in the smiles-and-hair-curlers vision of the 50's we're most presented with. What I identified most closely with is something I think the people of my age identify with quite closely, and the thing that I've spent the bulk of my own writing trying to make sense of - that is, a time of vague, unoriginal, baffling thoughts, a mentality for which the only assumption we can all agree on is that things, in general, are going to spend a long time not making much sense.

So what is it of our generation? I would say I - born in 1982, raised in small town Colorado - am of a generation in which irony is our preferred coping skill - things don't have to necessarily make sense if we can mock them and, by proxy, be above them. Therefore, there is no thought left to think nowadays, it's already been thought, rejected, and turned into an ironist punchline starting with the words, "He's one of those people who..." Being "one of those people who..." is about the worst punishment one of our age can work to avoid. For example, I right now am someone placing value on writing my thoughts down in a spot which few people will read (just then I had to fight the ironist instinct to replace "thoughts" with "inane thoughts"), and those that do will most certainly be people who already know me, are mostly fond of me, and will shrug and not think much of their existence. Which is a fine reaction to have.

The first time I read Joan Didion was for an assignment in a nonfiction writing class, and of that, I'll simply say "assignment" would be a less accurate word than "gift," and that I should send Peter Michelson a candy-gram for forcing "Goodbye to All That" into my life, thereby uprooting my sense of writing. I followed that reading with a ten-page essay about Bob Dylan and my father that was syntactically identical to her essay. To say I have plagiarized her in my writings since then would not be true, but also not entirely false - I've seeped in the way Joan writes, I've taken it in via every sense, and I know think and sweat in the precise and evocative syntax she created. She's made me learn the value of a well-placed "and," made me write down seemingly irrelevant details at parties, made me find the most emotive and honest way to describe a generality when those details are unavailable.

What that is, I think, is what Joan excells at, and why I'd like to think my generation is hers, on the morning after the 60's, the endless 60's, and the endless spectre of someone else's idealism - a sense of lost sincerity. I can't stop reading her descriptions and the descriptions like hers, things respecting the quizzical aspects of human nature embedded in every experience - the every-string-of-the-tapestry-counts depiction of observations and detachments, the way they add to and complete our longterm sense of confusion, and the way that acknowledging that confusion is, somehow, party to its own dissipation.