December 5, 2004
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Chorus from
The RockAuthor Joan Didion is 70 today.
On Didion’s late husband, John Gregory Dunne:
“His 1989 memoir Harp includes Dunne’s early years in Hartford and his
Irish-Catholic family’s resentment of WASP social superiority: ‘Don’t
stand out so that the Yanks can see you,’ he wrote, ‘don’t let your
pretensions become a focus of Yank merriment and mockery.’”– The Hartford Courant, August 4, 2002
From a Hartford Protestant:
The American Sublime
How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?
When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?
But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?
– Wallace Stevens
A search of the Internet for “Wallace Stevens” + “The Rock” +
“Seventy Years Later” yields only one quotation…Log24 entries of Aug. 2, 2002:
From “Seventy Years Later,” Section I of “The Rock,” a poem by Wallace Stevens:
A theorem proposed
between the two –
Two figures in a nature
of the sun….From page 63 of The New Yorker issue dated August 5, 2002:
“Birthday, death-day –
what day is not both?”
— John UpdikeFrom Didion’s Play It As It Lays:
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how
everything goes. I watch a hummingbird, throw the I Ching but
never read the coins, keep my mind in the now.
– Page 8From Play It As It Lays:
I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird. This morning I
threw the coins in the swimming pool, and they gleamed and turned in
the water in such a way that I was almost moved to read them. I
refrained.
– Page 214
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
