9:34 am • 8 June 2011 • 1 note
Rachel Monroe on Marion Milner's 'A Life of One's Own'
Relating really hard to most of this article and really want to read the book discussed in “2” now (even with the reservations about it discussed in “3” as WWJDS (What would Joan Didion say?) and the really important points made in “4”).
Some of that experimentation is through language, through the search for the right verbs and metaphors to translate her mind’s movement. It keeps secrets. It noses for crumbs. It spreads its tentacles, or narrows into a focussed beam of light. It behaves like water, a worm, a butterfly, a baby, a room that needs sweeping, beetles skimming the surface of a pond. Her ideas are “strange birds seen in remote marshes.”
AND
“In “On Self-Respect,” Joan Didion looks back at a “dry season” from her own past and “marvel[s] that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor.” But isn’t that exactly how it goes? When I’m happy, I’m too busy swimming or kissing or eating cookies to track the topography of my moods; when I’m uncomfortable — mentally, I mean — I poke and poke and poke at my brain as if it were a sore tooth.”
