Philippe Ariès, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973 and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. "Death," he wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden." The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new "ethical duty to enjoy oneself," a novel "imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others." In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was "to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened."
I will not forget the intuitive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
11:30:27
frisco
The above hit me pretty hard overall, but especially the first passage above, given that I've harped so strongly in my life on human beings' responsibility to themselves to be happy. I felt like Didion was yelling at me as she carefully pieced together the above, and I felt guilty. There may be more to say here; most likely I am not doing my own thoughts justice, but it's hard to say what justice is when you're three weeks or more away.
I've been in California for the week, first the Googleplex, now San Francisco. I just wandered the streets tonight, found must and sanctuary in a bookstore populated by men that may or may not have been there since the 60s, saw lots of youngsters on bicycles and bemoaned their steep-hill-climbing existence (but appreciated the massively dedicated bike culture; I liked especially the bar with a huge double decker bike rack along one half of the inside), and then just happened out of the blue upon 826 Valencia, which had already magnetized my attention before I had even a clue where I was.
It's very good to see mmm back in place. I feel a little uneven without the knowledge that it's here. I have such a connection with data, and extensive personally relavant data is buried in here, along with all this pseudo intellectual bullshit. It getting loose is like having another ex-boyfriend out there.