Joan Didion

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.

We are not idealized wild things.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage

In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.

, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.

This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night.

. I had taped the numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building needed an ambulance.

Someone else.

But I thought that if, as long as I didn’t let him in, he couldn’t tell me. And then it—none of that would’ve happened. So he kept saying, ‘Ma’am, I need to come in.’ And I kept telling him, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t come in.’”