The White Album

 

After reading the magnificent "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," I immediately picked up Joan Didion's "The White Album," which I had been meaning to read for some time.

Equally as riveting and elegantly written as her prior series of essays, it goes without saying that "The White Album" is an insightful, first-hand chronicle of one of the most turbulent times in American history.

Didion brings you front-and-center to niche locations and events that, if you didn't live during the era, you might not have heard about. 

The late 1960s was a time of confusion. Some people had ideals or were striving to have them, while others liked the idea of having ideals ("On the Morning After the Sixties"). Although the circumstances were vastly different, elements of a herd mentality, in this case the hippie ideology of the late 1960s, is comparable (not in ideology, but in the style of blind following) to movements in the present day, such as MAGA supporters. 

I was surprised when she mentioned that she had moments of crippling social anxiety and panic attacks. Her writing, so calm and calculated, would make you think otherwise. 

Similar to "Slouching," "The White Album" is primarily a series of meditations on living in California and its symbolism as the zeitgeist of the era, including old, established institutions ("The Getty") and her meditations on the California Aqueduct. 

Other essays take you far away to Bogotá, a city then on the precipice of great upheaval, and Hawaii during the Vietnam War, when soldiers' bodies are deposited into a dormant volcano crater. 

Some of my favorite paragraphs came from the Hawaiian essay:

"I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.

Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment's high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple's ranch, the freeway sniper who feels 'real bad' about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant enemies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows."

Of course, this is just a snippet of many other brilliant lines within "The White Album," as there are too many to count. 

Rating: 10/10