Blue Nights

Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us.

— Joan Didion, amazon.com

Children Raising Kids

As adults we lose memory of the gravity and terrors of childhood.

— Joan Didion, amazon.com

What It Means To Grow Up Growing Up Childhood Memory

Only then did I realize that during the three weeks that had passed between taking the taxi to Lenox Hill, on the fourteenth of June, and receiving the results of the full-body PET scan, on the eighth of July, I had allowed this year’s most deeply blue nights to come and go without my notice. What d…

— Joan Didion, amazon.com

Loss sickness Life Change

Things went wrong. She lost confidence. She became apprehensive in crowds. She was no longer entirely comfortable at the weddings of her grandchildren or even, in truth, at family dinners. She made mystifying, even hostile, judgments.

— Joan Didion, amazon.com

Gone Wrong Wrong Apprehensive

She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself.

— Joan Didion, amazon.com

Alcohol Drinking Too Much Anxious Depression

During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.

— Joan Didion, amazon.com

Blue Nights Chill Summer Is Gone

She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself.

— Joan Didion, amazon.com

Drinking Alcohol Self-Medicating

The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers s…

— Joan Didion, amazon.com

Summer Loss Feeling in colour Gloaming Apprehension

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