In her new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, the life that persists amid the disorder is Didion's, and the salient tatter of poetry that inspires her is from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.The lines that now reverberate in her inner ear are Eliot's: 'these fragments I have shored against my ruins.' The Year of Magical Thinking is an aching — and achingly beautiful — chronicle of this. The Year of Magical Thinking Summary From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. My Year of Magical Thinking. Posted on December 7, 2019 by stufffromthestuff Back in January I wrote about how I was trying to re-enchant my disenchanted world. As I was reflecting on this, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of people around me didn’t have this problem, but rather lived in a magical world.
- My Year Of Magical Thinking Review
- My Year Of Magical Thinking Joan Didion
- Magical Thinking Joan Didion
Overview
Understand magical thinking, and you will understand why the 20th century age of reason has lead us to a 'post-truth' society.
We are taught to deny, demonise or even glamorise magic – rather than ever admit to thinking magically. But it is every bit as fundamental to human nature as science, religion or art.
Faced with the growing popularity of alternative healing, astrology and the New Age, people ask: “whatever happened to the Enlightenment?” They assume that 'The Enlightenment' marked a break with a superstitious past; it was a forward leap for humanity after which any return to magical thinking would be regressive, or even impossible. It was a forward step, but it began by looking back two millennia to the Classical era, and re-discovering the foundations on which to build a culture of science and humanism that is considered to be the high point in human achievement.
The classical era was itself a high point in human culture, but it only spanned five centuries. The following, Roman, era saw a resurgence of magical thinking and laid the foundations for alchemy, astrology, alternative healing, and much of today’s magical ideas and practices. Pontius Pilate famously asked “what is truth?” and two thousand years later postmodernist philosophers are raising similar questions.
Is the revival of magical thinking just a natural evolution of thought, to be expected after five centuries of rationalism?
The author was brought up in the materialist 1950s and educated in that sceptical Enlightenment tradition to become a Cambridge mathematics graduate. Despite that, he became increasingly interested in magic and the occult and is now recognised as an authority on the subject. So how is it possible to shift from our knowledge of scientific reality to an acceptance of magic? The book describes the author’s own subjective experience of how that evolved over his lifetime.
Parts One and Two outline some of the important influences on his thinking and Parts Three and Four expand on CP Snow’s idea of two cultures (Art and Science) to propose four cultures: Art, Science, Religion and Magic. Part Five looks at the conflicts and misunderstandings between cultures and reasons why magic gets a raw deal, or is simply denied as a culture.
Part Six summarises the case and the Part Seven looks at contemporary trends and assumptions to show that the rise in magical thinking goes far deeper than just the visible popularity of astrology columns and alternative healing. A penultimate chapter provides practical suggestions for those willing to explore the value of magical thinking - or simply wanting to survive in a post-truth world.
In grief we strive, perhaps harder than ever. As our mind and body try to hold on to time, knowledge, and reality, this grip causes physical pain.1
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is an account of this grief-led striving following the completely extraordinary and unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, at their dinner table.
This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact life ends.
In grief, we strive for company, witnesses.2
Later I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks, all those friends and relatives who brought food and made drinks and laid out plates on the dining room table for however many people were around at lunch or dinner, all those who picked up the plates … I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them.
In the midst of company, we also seek solitude.
After that first night I would not be alone for weeks (Jim and his wife Gloria would fly in from California the next day. Nick would come back to town, Tony and his wife Rosemary would come down from Connecticut, Jose would not go to Las Vegas, our assistant Sharon would come back from skiing, there would never not be people in the house), but I needed that first night to be alone.
I needed to be alone so he could come back.
This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.
In grief, we strive for poise. Poise obtained by balance, posturing and steadfast head up. For Didion, this poise comes from intellectual distance and precise observation contained in this account. “This is my attempt to make sense,” she wrote.
In grief, we strive to communicate. Language falls woefully short, lacking movement, lacking collage, lacking ability to express the simultaneous explosion of thoughts in our grieving minds.
My Year Of Magical Thinking Review
The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is the case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, and let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is the 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.
Ultimately, in grief we strive for meaning, purpose, and some—any—distinctive path in this new silent universe where there is nothing but abstraction. Even the mountains are silent, wrote T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land.”
In grief our greatest pillars of being disintegrate.
The Year of Magical Thinking is time-bound, beginning with Dunne’s collapse, passing through Didion’s aftershock, the funeral, the “craziness,” and, ultimately, settling down in the complete emptiness of a world without he who has died.
My Year Of Magical Thinking Joan Didion
Neither Didion’s magical thinking nor her account in The Year of Magical Thinking pulls us out of grief because Didion herself wasn’t pulled out of grief. She pulls us into it and holds us tight.
I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account. Nor do I want to finish the year. The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. I look for resolution and find none.
[…]
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.
The dead are dead, and we are unassailably alive. But, Didion concludes, the dead will always have been.
Read more on mortality, grief, and the abstraction of life in Robert McCrum’s3memoir of living with death or Max Porter’s prose/poem about a crow that abides with a family in grief.
Magical Thinking Joan Didion
I’ve compiled a few more thoughts in Our Unknowable Real Mortality, Do Things Exist Where They Are Buried?, and Didion’s second—and equally magical—account of grief, Blue Nights, closing a couplet of pain no one should have to endure.