Goodbye To All That

Didion's prose is lucid, elegant, and makes use of both conversational and descriptive techniques. As far as the entire piece is concerned, I will say that the content wore me down a little. I never really know what to make of personal essays like this, or ones that have an explicit moral to them but go out of their way to make it ambiguous to the reader, with hopes that maybe they'll relate or agree under its unidentifiable terms. The sentiment is stuffed inside of moment after moment of vivid descriptions and vague anecdotes, all usually delivered within long sentences.

Her introductory paragraph has a few polysyndetic sentences that successfully bundle together her abstract ideas of youth: "When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off at DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again." (1) The sentence is marked by its conjunctions and additional thoughts, cramming into one sentence the fullness that first impression--marked by familiar sensations of something unknown to her. The short sentence ("In fact it never was.") that follows is the kind of conversational additive that Nabokov employs in Lolita. Curiously, Didion tends to do this throughout the piece, giving it a more conversational feel in places. I can almost hear her reciting it to a 'new face' at a party she she attended when she was 32, or something like that. It happens when she isolates thoughts in parentheses, offering information that isn't vital, but that deepens her description on a personal level, as in the case of: "I was making only $65 or $70 a week then ("Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie's hands, I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by the editor of the magazine for which I worked)..."(2).

Didion occasionally uses the second person to strengthen her argument, which I believe to be something along the lines of: We are all idealistic when we're young and then we grow out of it and that is that. She assumes that her audience has some sort of relationship with the experiences she mentions: "I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again." I wonder if she's using the second person to imply that many of us feel these same sensations (I, for one, do not love the first person who ever touched me and I think the same goes for many people I know--unless we're talking about nurturing mommy touches), or if she simply got tired of using "I."

The question of her intended audience for this piece is curious, because while it's worth reading the piece for its astute moments like, "I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspectives" (5), there's an underlying implication that there she has in incentive in telling us about her experiences in New York as a genuine West Coast person. The essay begins abstractly with the mention of beginnings and endings. Is she trying to say that life is not like it is in the movies, with a clear beginning and end? Reading it now, it all seems a little too obvious. But perhaps it was less so when it was published.