SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
Joan Didion
Ms. Hen bought this book because she heard Joan Didion is a
great writer and she felt like she needed to read more essays. Ms. Hen has
never been to California, and reading this made her want to go because most of
the essays are about California in one shape or another.
The title essay is about San Francisco in 1967 and the
blossoming hippie culture. Ms. Didion went to San Francisco to talk to people
to see what was happening so she could write about the movement. She told the
people that she met she was a journalist and watched young people going about
their lives.
The hippies did drugs. A lot of them. All the time. Ms.
Didion was thirty-two when she observed their lifestyle so she had the ability
to step back and consider what they were doing. Being on drugs impaired their
judgment about everything. She didn’t think the hippies had a beautiful life
and there was even much of a movement happening, she thought they were all
confused.
At the end of “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” Ms. Didion wrote
about how see saw a five year old on an acid trip. For a year, the girl’s
mother had given her acid and peyote. The writer did not judge the situation,
but you could see how appalled she became. There is something entirely wrong
about giving a child acid, and everyone knows this.
In this essay, Ms. Didion shows the growing pains of a
country that needed to break free of its repressed youth. This generation were
the baby boomers, the ones who came forth after World War II, and needed to
break free of the Eisenhower/McCarthy age. These kids wanted to become awakened
and high as a steeple, and that’s what they became. They didn’t know or care
about what would happen in the future, or if there would even be a future.
In “Notes from a Native Daughter,” Ms. Didion writes about
Sacramento, her hometown. She writes about the past and the present at the time
in which she wrote the essay. She writes about the newcomers, people who worked
at the Aerojet-General and their families, who would never know the old stories
of the place, about the Donner-Reed party and cannibalism, or about the rich
man who lives in a trailer on the land where his mansion burnt down. There are
many places like this in the United States, with colorful pasts that get lost
when gentrification occurs, or the old-timers move away or die.
Ms. Didion did not die in New York, but she got very
depressed because the city became too much for her as she explains in the
essay, “Goodbye to All That.” She describes how she lived in New York when she
was young, and new possibilities appeared around every corner, but as the years
went by, she kept hearing the same stories from different people. Ms. Hen might
be the one to tell the same stories again, but she tries to tell them to
different people so nobody will get bored. It’s true that a place can get to
you, get under your skin and ruin your perspective. Ms. Hen is never bored
anywhere because she is a purse.
Ms. Hen liked this book even though she’s never been to
California and a lot of the aspects of some of the essays are quite dated. She
likes reading about how the world used to be and she’s glad the world isn’t
that way anymore. There are some things about the way things used to be that
Ms. Hen misses, such as freedom from cell phones. A peek into the past and one woman’s view of the world is
what this book offers and Ms. Hen was ready to receive that gift.
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