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A review by ellemaddy
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
This is a book about grief, remembrance, and about aging. All aspects of life that always send me into a spiral of anxieties. I do not relate to this, but I’m afraid I will be. That’s the thing about having anxiety, you can imagine a thousand ways where your life can go wrong and you can imagine it so vividly. It is borrowing fears and grief from the future.
I have so much sympathy for Joan Didion, while i might never know what it is to be a mother or to lose a child, i can still sympathize with her because i have a mother whom i love very dearly.
“She had no idea how much we needed her.
How could we have so misunderstood one another?”
“The ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear.
The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other.”
“The source of the fear was obvious: it was the harm that could come to her. A question: if we and our children could in fact see the other clear would the fear go away? Would the fear go away for both of us, or would the fear go away only for me?”
I really thought that the writing was beautiful. I loved the repetitions, the constant callbacks and the reoccurring glimpses of memories, of objects, of places, of things. It paints such a vivid picture.
“Time passes.
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Even memory of the stephanotis in her braid, even memory of the plumeria tattoo showing through the tulle.
It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napoléon Bonaparte said that.
What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripedes said that.
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
I said that”
“In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.
In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.
How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.”
“During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.”
I have so much sympathy for Joan Didion, while i might never know what it is to be a mother or to lose a child, i can still sympathize with her because i have a mother whom i love very dearly.
“She had no idea how much we needed her.
How could we have so misunderstood one another?”
“The ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear.
The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other.”
“The source of the fear was obvious: it was the harm that could come to her. A question: if we and our children could in fact see the other clear would the fear go away? Would the fear go away for both of us, or would the fear go away only for me?”
I really thought that the writing was beautiful. I loved the repetitions, the constant callbacks and the reoccurring glimpses of memories, of objects, of places, of things. It paints such a vivid picture.
“Time passes.
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Even memory of the stephanotis in her braid, even memory of the plumeria tattoo showing through the tulle.
It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napoléon Bonaparte said that.
What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripedes said that.
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
I said that”
“In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.
In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.
How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.”
“During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.”