Quarantine Diary #650

12/23/2021

This photo is by my friend Jennifer Beiriger. (I don’t think Jennifer knows this but I can’t spell her name. My brain will not learn and keep the correct spelling of Beiriger so I have it on a post-it note next to my desk. It’s been there a couple years.)

Ebbing late afternoon light can break your heart.

The first thing a newborn sees is light. The last thing a dying person seems to see is a glorious rosy light opening in their brain as they leave. 

…

Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star”

This is the whole poem:  Click here. 

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud –
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.

--
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

This poem, set to beautiful music by Randall Thompson: Click here.

…

Joan Didion died today.

Len and I were beginning to date by which I mean we were beginning to realize there was another person in the world who “got” us.  I was interested in his stories; he was interested in mine.  It’s pretty heady, those early days of finding your person.

Len would stop after work on Thursdays to buy and then bring to me the NYT because on Thursdays they featured their “Hers” columns; essays written by women. Maybe some of you remember it.

One of the first “Hers” columns I read was by Joan Didion. Everything she said was, to me, like someone giving me the words for my own life. She cared about things. She was often depressed. She noticed details. She despised hypocrisy even as she recognized it in herself. She managed the looming grief and overwhelmingness of life by writing about it.

Joan Didion was the first woman to show me that a woman could write about what she thought about. That saying things aloud in an essay gives a person a path into and through their life.

I have not read her "Year of Living Magically." I'm not brave enough yet to read about losing her daughter and her husband. Have you read it?

Quotes by Joan Didion:

“I don't know what I think until I write it down.”

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

…

Since I wrote yesterday that we are not getting together with our family on Christmas, we've heard from two more families who’ve made the same decision.

One of my daughters works in downtown Chicago. She just sent this photo taken from her office window. “This is why omicron is spreading.”

…

How are you doing?