Powerful group-based searches, with static, smart, and virtual groups. Automatic searches of PubMed let you discover articles as soon as they are published. Use a built-in browser to download references with pdfs or and/or web pages with a click. With Bookends you can easily import references (information about journal articles, books) from EndNote, and directly search and import from PubMed, the Web of Science, Google Scholar, JSTOR, Amazon, the Library of Congress, and hundreds of other online sources. And Blue Nights is her realization more than 40 years later: there comes a day when it doesn’t anymore.Bookends is a full featured and cost-effective bibliography/reference and information management system for students and professionals. “It all comes back,” Didion writes in 1966, unaware of the shallowness of what she’d lost so far, convinced by the rhythm of her words. She writes, “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.” She writes, “In fact I no longer value this kind of memento./ I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted./ There was a period… when I thought I did./ A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep things with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things”, their totems.” In Blue Nights, she notes the boxes and drawers in her apartment stuffed with history, the notebooks, the stuff she’s been acquiring through her years, all items she’d once blithely advertised as “paid passage back to the world out there.” How, as the older woman in Didion’s essay tells her, “Someday it all comes.” And none of it has started to leave you yet the future is all promise, and it’s here.īlue Nights is a 77 year old Didion looking back at her 32 year old self who’d supposed herself older than she’d ever be again. 32 is an age where your preceding decade has changed life beyond all recognition, and you’ve finally sensed an order to it all. She was 32 when she wrote this essay, which is the age I am now, and it’s an age at which you feel there are whole lifetimes behind you, and it’s so fascinating to consider these. “Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singular blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.” And then later, “…I have always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.” In Blue Nights, Didion writes, “How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?”Īnd then further on the essay when she addresses her notes, her compulsion to maintain these notebooks in order to keep in touch with the people she used to be, “paid passage back to the world out there”. She’s not even opaque about it, but some readers are still so unable to get around the fact of a woman writing honestly about motherhood than they’ve been hypnotized into thinking motherhood is all that Blue Nights is about.īut yes, to read “On Keeping a Notebook” after Blue Nights is to invest the essay with a whole new level of meaning. As Didion writes in “On Keeping a Notebook”, “however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of what we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I’.” Like everything Didion has ever written, Blue Nights is profoundly about herself. I think it’s my favourite book of all of hers.)īut first, Blue Nights is not a book about Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo. (I also don’t understand why no one talks about Where I Was From. FebruBookends: Joan Didion's Blue Nights and "On Keeping a Notebook"Īs I read Joan Didion’s 1966 “On Keeping a Notebook” today, it occurred to me that this essay is the piece that is the bookend to her new book Blue Nights, and not The Year of Magical Thinking as so many critics have suggested.
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