knowing who I am

I came across Joan Didion's charming essay Why I Write through a long series of links, which started at Jordon Cooper's place. In fact, the essay is a delightful tour of ideas about writing; and for anyone who writes regularly - as my son is fond of putting it - "this will sound very familiar to you".

But one paragraph charmed me completely, a paragraph less about writing and more about that observation of the incidental moments in life. I remember making a very long coach journey when I was 18 - it took 2 whole days, broken by 8 overnight hours on Glasgow station. Amazingly, I came to no harm whatsoever. The purpose of the journey was to leave behind my family home, which was disintegrating around me at that point, and to find my way to friends who were staying for the summer in a crofter's cottage on the Isle of Skye. I remember bits and pieces about the situation I left behind, and a few moments from the time on Skye. But what is etched deeply in my mind is that bus journey.

Anyway, here's Joan Didion:

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas--I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in "The Portrait of a Lady" as well as the next person, "imagery" being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention--but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of "Paradise Lost," to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in "Paradise Lost," the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Comments

[Caroline]

I don't have bus stories but I can resonate with "knowing what I wasn't". I remember sitting in a library wandering through books trying to find a definition that fitted me. I couldn't then and I try desperately to avoid definitions now..

I'm still not sure what I am

but I do know that I'm becoming ...

and I find that very exciting as people I meet along the way help that process of becoming.