June 9, 2009
-
A Sermon About Nothing:
Recessional“I know what
nothing means.”
– Joan Didion,
Play It As It Lays
Faust
President Faust of Harvard on Joan Didion:
“She was referring to life as a kind of improvisation: that magical crossroads of rigor and ease, structure and freedom, reason and intuition. What she calls being prepared to ‘go with the change.’”
“I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.”
From the same book:
“The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place.”
– Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
For a magical crossroads at another university, see the five Log24 entries ending on November 25, 2005:
This holy icon
appeared at
N37°25.638′
W122°09.574′
on August 22, 2003,
at the Stanford campus.Also from that date,
an example of clarity
in another holy icon –
– in honor of better days
at Harvard and of a member
of the Radcliffe Class of 1964.
