I haven’t read Blue Nights yet— my life this month is such that Mindy Kaling is about all I can handle between the bouts of coughing and grading. But there are things I’ve been thinking about since The Year of Magical Thinking, and this review touches on two of them. First, that we read these books not necessarily as voyeurs, but as students; we too will lose everything we love and our selves one day (the only question is whether we will lose everything we love first, or both everything loved and self at once), and we read to learn how it is done. Second, we read these books to watch how they fail. Meaning, as this reviewer puts it, that art must fail.
But I would add something more, which is that we read them to watch art persist, unwillingly. For Didion and many writers (not all) writing is a wave in the brain, a movement in the limbs that will persist even after the heart has stopped. It is the motion of the remaining legs of a crushed insect. What a miraculous horror. This is the true and dark language instinct: of making many books there is no end.
How to make meaning, and why write?— if you are no longer of primary or secondary importance to anyone alive; if no one living is any longer of primary or secondary importance to you? For Didion this is the task of the last years of her life; for others it is the task of every decade. Blue Nights suggests that all meaning will be made on the sentence level, and that it will be made whether we will it or not, and whether or not we can bear it.
