essays: reading Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”

The essay, inspired by Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”, was originally written in October 2019. I felt like sharing it now and made only a few minor edits.

(Joan Didion is one of my favorite authors. In most cases, I have little understanding of the things she writes about, but there are some essays that are less centered on documenting other people and their lives, and more about Joan herself. I do believe I have a fairly better understanding of those.)

In “Goodbye to All That”, Joan Didion writes about New York—New York as a city with an emphasized dream-like quality for a young woman who is relentlessly exploring its streets, its bridges, and its people. Something I am familiar with, only a different city (I mean Paris, which, by the way, she mentions in the essay as well).

I would start my story about the city on a positive note. I’m not sure how, but I could talk about all those places I had created in my head—exquisite gardens with blooming flowers and fountains, wide streets with tall buildings and small balconies, and lovely squares with ornate benches to sit on. I could talk about how I found all these imaginary places in Paris and how I thought I would never leave them by my own will; because if you have flowers, and birds, and fountains, and these places give you shelter from bad thoughts, how could you possibly want (or need) anything else, anything more?

Joan’s first sentence: “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends”, she mentions the difficulty to pinpoint “the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer optimistic as she once was”. Beginnings are intoxicating, full of promises and hopes, especially if they’re going according to the plan, but if something goes wrong, it’s not easy to determine at what point. In my case, it was probably a cumulative effect of nagging fears, a consequence of complete disregard for some realistic aspects of life. It was a bittersweet love story, and my decision to leave Paris could be easily explained in simple, down-to-earth terms (and I actually do that when people ask me, I give them “certain stock answers” as she puts it—I tell them about work, about loneliness, about bureaucratic hell), but I refuse to do that here.

“When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime”—when I first saw Paris I was seventeen, and it was summertime. And I was nineteen when I came back, determined to make it my (new) home. It was great being naïve, romantic, impractical when living in Paris. It was probably one of the best feelings in the world. I feel like I was awarded with my real childhood there, with a sense of wonder and fantasy I had only experienced through books before.

“[…] one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before”—I still have this conviction, probably because I’m twenty-three.

“In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones, that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along”—yes.

Joan tries to convey that New York is a city for “only the very young”. While I don’t mean to contradict the things I said a couple of paragraphs above, I don’t think that Paris is the city for only the very young. Joan also mentions trying to meet “new faces”. I never wanted to meet any new faces. What I enjoyed the most were fleeting interactions with strangers, and in most cases, they were older people. I remember seeing so many extraordinarily elegant women and men. One particular scene comes to my mind. Late autumn, I was in Jardin du Palais Royal, and an older gentleman was walking his dog. The color of his dog, a light brown springer, matched the color of the trees behind him, and the color of the man’s coat matched the façade of a palace behind him; so there were trees and a dog, and there was a man and a building—two perfect combinations, a curious union of alive and non-alive elements.

Another thing to add, there is this fashionable idea that Paris is all about terraces, slow afternoons, reading newspapers, never rushing anywhere, standing in museums for hours, joie de vivre and all that, but how many people (young people) actually enjoy something like this, and could do that on a daily basis? I mean, sit in one place for, let’s say, six hours, enjoying the company of one’s own thoughts, not demanding attention from anyone? Not feeling a compulsive need to make a conversation, because there are too many conversations going on in your head already? Paris gave me a lot of material for such conversations, because “Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about.”

“You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there”—nothing about Paris felt real, especially when I was studying. As the studies were approaching their end, many things I had previously ignored caught up with me, and I could not take care of them easily. Suddenly I realized I was living a very real life. (To be fair, Joan was talking here about an impression of staying in the city only for a couple of months and the fact that you do not lead a “real” life in a “temporary” place; as for me, I was sure of the fact that I would stay in Paris forever).

“That is what it was all about, wasn’t it? Promises? Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited”—when Paris comes back to me, it doesn’t come back in “hallucinatory flashes”, I carefully select what I want to remember, and I prefer to remember places and feelings, rather than people. Deep down, I’m ashamed of the relationships I cultivated, and I no longer recognize myself in most of the social situations I participated in back then. I feel like I have undergone a violent transformation. It didn’t manifest outwardly in an accentuated way, perhaps, but I feel the implications very clearly.

“I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing”—I loved the idea of keeping my location secret… Obviously, I use this word very loosely here, and of course, my close ones could have a vague idea that I was probably sitting somewhere by the Seine or in Luxembourg Gardens, those traditional Parisian places especially attractive for the new habitants of the city. They could just call me, ask and I would tell them where I was. But what if I was not by the Seine, not in famous gardens, what if I was sitting on a shabby bench by Canal Saint-Martin instead? Or wandering in Boulevard de Sébastopol? Maybe somewhere in the thirteenth arrondissement, walking under the aerial metro tracks, following the itinerary of the line six train? In my last year in Paris, that was often the case. I tried to expand my perimeter and change my usual walking routes. On weekends, I would come up with a special plan to go somewhere relatively far, to some placethat was probably not Paris anymore, and I would follow the unknown streets back to the heart of the city.

I tried to think of some more responses I could have given had someone asked me “So where are you now, exactly?” Exactly? I was walking a long way from the Communist Party headquarters, and now I am on a hill somewhere in the twentieth arrondissement, there are no people around me, and I can see Sacré-Coeur through rose bushes; now I am standing in front of Musée Montmartre, calculating if I have enough time to go in there before the classes; now I am in a restaurant near Place de la Bourse, waiting to meet somebody from my own country, who wants to know how I am keeping up here; now I am lost somewhere in Parc des Buttes Chaumont, and I am not really looking for an exit, because somebody told me this is a charming place to disappear in; I am in metro station Laumière and people around me are really scary, so I would better go home quickly! I would better go home quickly…

(Me coming back home—is it a “curious aberration”?)