That is Joan Didion, pictured above. The picture was taken in San Francisco, in the late 1960s. The White Album, a book of Didion's essays (all of which essays had been previously published, before being included in the book), appeared in 1979.
I captured that picture from an article in The New York Times, which appeared in the newspaper on March 6, 2025. I encourage you to read the article yourself (paywall policies permitting), if you'd like to revisit the Manson Murders, which are prominently featured in The White Album.
I am not, in this blog posting, going to discuss the Manson Murders. Rather, I want to reference a line from Didion, mentioned in The Times' story. This is the first line of The White Album:
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
I think that this statement is worth pondering. "Stories," in the way Didion is using the word, suggests that such "stories" are not "true." Such "stories" might even be intentionally deceptive, but even if we are not aware of it, and even if we are not intentionally telling untruths, Didion seems to be asserting that we "lie" to ourselves, or "make things up," in order to be able to live.
This does not sound like a good thing, does it - at least as presented that way? Let me try to render Didion's thought a different way.
In fact, to "live" means to move (individually and collectively) into a future that does not yet exist. We are alive in the "present," having lived through the "past," but in order to live we must move forward. Our lives - the lives we create (individually and collectively) exist only as we take action, and because we have received the inestimable gift of human freedom, we can do "anything." We are not "determined" by our past, or by what we have been told. We can do things never even thought about before, never envisioned.
As I like to say, I "majored in Utopia" at Stanford. I am an unashamed "utopian thinker." Observing what now exists is fine. It is, in fact, critically important, but we are not ultimately constrained by what we generally denominate as "reality."
"Reality" is what exists now. But what exists now is not "inevitable." Reality, going forward, will be what we make it (and for good or ill, both destinies being possible).
So, I am proposing that we remember Joan Didion's comment in this way: We need to tell ourselves stories about our ability to change the world for good, to make a reality that conforms to what we want to create.
That's not easy. That might take an entire lifetime, or even more, but that is the human project, our human assignment (individually and collectively).
Today's blog posting is a salute to Joan Didion. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
Let us tell ourselves the most wonderful stories we can envision. And then make them come true.
Our children, and theirs, will thank us for this thought, and for the actions that must follow upon it!
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