Joan Didion‘s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, much like her other writing of the same era, captures the turbulence of a culture in upheaval. The rapid social and cultural changes of the 1960s are unflinchingly reported by Didion, and she manages to write about her own experience of these events, with these people, in these places, without coming across as narcissistic or overbearing. The presence of her strong journalistic persona gives the issues a sense of urgency and realism.

The strongest pieces in Slouching Towards Bethlehem are the exclusively personal essays, “On Keeping a Notebook” and “On Self-Respect” were both resonant. “On Keeping a Notebook” ruminates on the notebooks of our lives, the snippets of conversations, places and times we choose to report and remember representing a definition of the self created from personal memories; basically that we create our own histories with what we record. Perhaps, removing the romantic notion associated with the writer’s notebook, can we use this way of thinking to look how we use twitter, tumblr, and so on as similar records of self? “On Self-Respect” is a call to reinstate the importance of a sense of self; it sounds trite as I write it, but Didion makes the possession of a sense of self, and the self-respect that comes along with that, as something exciting and powerful. I’m going to quote it at length here, because I found it inspiring:

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. [...] Nonetheless, character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
[...] To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. [...] At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

Even typing that out now instills me with the strength to hold my head up high, as well as realize past mistakes as being exemplary of what she is talking about. Reading “On Self-Respect” will encourage you to stand a little taller, demand what you deserve and refuse to settle for less than you are worth, I think it is an essay which I will be returning to time and time again.

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

Other essays, while not as powerfully effective on me as this one, are just as clearly elucidated. From masculine camaraderie on a John Wayne film set, to Joan Baez’s peace and non-violence school, to the title essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” in which Didion captures the hippie movement in San Francisco with an unforgiving eye. Refusing to wholly buy into the peace, love, tune in drop out mentality, Didion instead shows us another side of the hippies without condemning them. Slouching Towards Bethlehem at once captures the 1960s cultural zeitgeist without the retrospective nostalgia, encourages a sense of place and feels, at times, like an intensely personal insight into the life and thoughts of a young Joan Didion.