5 ideas
People survive by imposing narrative lines on disparate images: they choose which of many interpretations to believe and treat a sequence of events as a lesson or a pattern. When that interpretive machinery breaks, experience arrives as unedited fragments with no meaning.
In summer 1968 Didion had an attack of vertigo and nausea and went through outpatient psychiatric testing in Santa Monica. The report described a person who sees the world as alien, incomprehensible and hostile, and who feels her own inadequacy deeply. She reproduced the report and argued that such a reaction was not an inappropriate response to that summer, then set it beside the August 9, 1969 Cielo Drive murders, which she says many in Los Angeles believe ended the Sixties abruptly.
Didion reproduces the list she kept taped inside her closet door for reporting trips: skirts, a leotard, a mohair throw, a typewriter, bourbon. The list let her pack without thinking and slip into a ready-made reporter persona. She notes that it left out a watch, so the checklist that promised mastery showed how little she actually controlled.
Didion rejects the idea that migraine is a punishment or a neurotic choice and treats it as an inherited physiological condition. Fighting it or denying it only makes it worse. What works is accommodation: you recognize the prodrome, lie down and let the attack run its course, and afterward comes a kind of euphoric clarity.
In arid California, whoever moves water holds real power over land and life, so the dams, aqueducts and pumps of the State Water Project are the region's true politics. Didion visits the Project's Operations Control Center and admits she wants to control the flow herself. For her, fascination with waterworks is a longing for order imposed on a hostile landscape.