“You know what this entire session has been about, don’t you?”
No, I said.
“It’s about being forced to sum up. Looking at your life. Asking yourself if you’ve truly lived it. Asking yourself what you’ve really got to leave behind. This is something everybody has to face. It’s hard to face. But if you face it now, and make whatever changes you need to make, you’re going to have a shot at dying peaceful.”
NY Times Book Review: “Peeking into Joan Didion’s Years of Psychological Thinking. Drawn from her previously unpublished reflections on sessions with a therapist, “Notes to John” is at once slightly sordid and utterly fascinating.”
Guardian Book Review: “‘I dealt with everyone at a distance’: what do Joan Didion’s therapy diaries reveal about guilt, motherhood and writing?
The Atlantic: Joan Didion’s Books Should Have Been Enough.”
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
And as a lover of Sparrows, this Sawsan is for you.
Sparrow is everywhere and always will be. The birds scatter. Her crying perplexes them. Yet who comes hopping back first, cocking her dun-colored head? Of course, the sparrow. The great avian improvisor. The one who makes her nest in cold chimneys and tailpipes and ruined foundations, the one who has learned to concede the ideal. And for this reason, she is everywhere. Sparrow is everywhere and always will be.
Dear Mother, You used to call me Sparrow. Why Sparrow? Well, because the woods are full of sparrows, and you loved everything outdoors. Songbirds, wildflowers, wind. You could read the weather like a poem. But why did I remind you of a sparrow and not another songbird? I never thought to ask. With their white cheeks and dingy underparts, plain brown sparrows are everywhere. They beg at outdoor tables and hop under city benches. They nest in chimneys and rafters and even tailpipes. Sparrows are not much to look at, but they’re smart. Canny. Tiny, feathered battle-axes. Sparrows are survivors. I like to think that’s what you meant… No woman is a star. No woman is a god or a tree or a magician. But for a while, in your arms, the universe was the right size, and I knew where I was…Mothers have a sixth sense. Their love is occult.
We are creatures of great change. Not a single atom in our bodies today was there when we were children. Every bit of us has been replaced many times over. We flake away and become new. Whatever we are now, we are not the stuff from which we were originally made. All the people we once were. All the people we had once hoped to be.
Man can write. I’d read anything he puts on paper….
NY Times Book Review: “A Novel Explores the Undersea Cables That Connect the World. The crew in Colum McCann’s new book makes complex repairs deep in the ocean. Human bonds prove harder to mend.”
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
“How, after all, does one dare, how can one presume?” That is Cynthia Ozick on the paralyzing challenge of saying something new about Franz Kafka. But they can be applied equally to Ms. Ozick, who in her 60-plus years of publishing has produced a body of work—novels, short stories, essays, criticism, poetry and plays—unrivaled by any living American author. Can such a monument be summarized without being cheapened?
One dares to try in part because of the mist of obscurity that has always surrounded Ms. Ozick’s output, the rift between her reputation and her readership. Perhaps no other author of her accomplishment has been so consistently taken for granted. Ms. Ozick is 96 years old and still laboring at her trade like an outsider with something to prove. Not for her are the perquisites of eminence. There have been no vague, self-indulgent late works (her 2021 novel, “Antiquities,” is as sharp and questing as anything she has written); no retirement celebrations, Festschrifts or public tributes as there were for her contemporary Philip Roth. The closest Ms. Ozick may come to a career retrospective is “In a Yellow Wood,” a heaping selection of short stories and essays that seems likely to burnish her legacy while continuing to confound all attempts at marketing her. […]
The artist, Ms. Ozick continually asserts, must claim absolute imaginative freedom, even at the risk of being misunderstood. “Coiled in the bottommost pit of every driven writer is an impersonator—protean, volatile, restless and relentless,” she says in “Isaac Babel and the Identity Question.” […]
Such are the fertile contradictions of Cynthia Ozick, a self-described “fanatic” of literature who grasps better than anyone the moral perils of fanaticism, an accomplished writer who deeply distrusts the worldly authority her writing has earned her. “The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to,” she once said. So this titan of literature keeps her head down, toiling away like the hapless strivers and mole-eyed bookworms of her stories, working not for recognition but to contribute something lasting to posterity, with its dreamt-of future readers who are as avid for the pleasures of art as she is. Now that is daring, that is presumption.
