December 30, 2005
Three Underlined Sentences
From Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking:
“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him.”
“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”
“Time is the school in which we learn.”
I did not realize until page 215—out of 227 pages—that I would finish the book on the same day, December 30, that Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne died two years ago. It is also the day I am moving in to an apartment with my girlfriend for the first time. Life does that sometimes.