The White Album

The title of the last section indicates the mood that permeates the two essays: quiet. Didion isn’t visiting revolutionary leaders in jail, observing funerals for dead soldiers, or crisscrossing the country on a book tour. In the essays of this section, she’s calm. Instead of excitement or upheaval, she describes mostly introspection and effective systems.

The title “On the Morning After the Sixties” is somewhat misleading. The essay centers on Didion’s college experience in the 1950s. At UC Berkeley, she has a calm afternoon. Didion notes that she’s “lying on a leather couch in a fraternity house,” reading a book and listening to music from a piano (183). She juxtaposes her tranquil time at Berkeley with 1960s Berkeley and its “barricades and reconstituted classes” (184). Didion is “distrustful of political highs” (184). She adds, “If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error” (184). Flawed humans make up the world, so their institutions are imperfect. Activism hides the blemished reality of the world—it’s “just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate” (184).

The main confrontation is personal. People must face their faults: “What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace” (185). Didion developed her subjective viewpoint, and she displays her perspective throughout the essays. She admits that her outlook is pessimistic:

If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending (1970).

Adverse to (or at least ambivalent about) ascribing meaning, Didion can’t impose such a hopeful narrative on the world. She simply documents her reality—what she sees when she looks at the world. Her impressions might not be reassuring, but they’re accurate to her.

Didion’s Malibu neighborhood is a community, and she repeats the word “we” to highlight how people look after one another: “We called one another in times of wind and fire and rain, we knew when one another’s septic tanks needed pumping, we watched for ambulances on the highway and helicopters on the beach” (198-99). The people have a system. They devise ways to communicate with one another over tangible things. There is “shared isolation and adversity” (199), and the residents have protocols to deal with their problems.

The systems motif continues with Didion’s portrait of the Zuma Beach lifeguards. She admires their charts, logs, and forms. She describes their laconic vocabulary: “On the whole the lifeguards favored a diction as flat and finally poetic as that of Houston Control” (190). Lifeguards to her symbolize a kind of concrete honesty or reality. They must try to save people or at least keep them safe. Their jobs involve danger. At the same time, the lifeguards’ reality is mundane. When Didion visits them, they’re not rescuing a person from death but trying to retrieve a rescue boat part. Nonetheless, the lifeguards compose an effective system, and the system earns Didion’s esteem.

Likewise, Amado Vazquez has a system for breeding orchids. He too represents reality. Although this orchid business’s origin is associated with the movies—a movie producer starts it—it’s not a media product or a constructed story; it’s real. Didion talks to Vazquez about his dedication to flowers: “It seemed to me that day that I had never talked to anyone so direct and unembarrassed about the things he loved” (198). Didion has another motive for visiting Vazquez: She loves “the particular light and silence of greenhouses” (193). Greenhouses symbolize a type of calm or quiet that fits in with the essay’s mood.

Didion upends the quiet and subverts the relatively calm narrative by describing a devastating fire in 1978 that wrecks Vazquez’s nursery and three years of work. The damage arguably reinforces Vazquez’s symbolic meaning. The fire forces him to confront the pain of loss—and pain is a sign of reality or truth. The fire reinforces Didion’s ambiguous relationship with reality as well because it nearly destroys her former house—but because she’s not living there anymore, she doesn’t face loss or adverse consequences.