The Year of Magical Thinking

Perhaps giving evidence to time being a flat circle, in the year 2022 I've become enthralled with books again, like a teenage me eagerly heading to the library after school or rushing home after school to eagerly devour another few chapters in Brian Jacques's "Redwall series," now I head to the library as an adult anticipating what new treasures might be in the "New Arrivals" section. (My wish to visit all the baseball stadiums/ colleges in America has evolved into wanting to visit all the top libraries/bookstores in America). I don't feel bad about checking books out at the library because MJ supports publishers/the book industry by buying a book once in a while that she really feels in touch with, and the most recent purchase was "The Year of Magical Thinking," by the late great Joan Didion, in which she describes the year of trauma and recovery after her husband's death on December 30, 2003. She does something to cope with being a widow that I can wholeheartedly relate to: For each day in 2004 she thinks about what she was doing with her husband a year ago that day, in 2003, thus keeping his memory alive and spending that year (of magical thinking) still with him. 

I do the same thing, except I do it for multiple different years, always looking back and checking where I was, what I was doing, retreiving select memories to use as milestones in my life, and recently, I've been doing that after my grandfather passed away. thinking about what I was doing a year ago, 10 years ago, 30 years ago (December was my 30-year anniversary of arriving in America for the first time with my grandpa when I was just four and a half, starting a new life with him, and 30 years later I would be starting a new life without him). The Year of Magical Thinking darts back and forth in town in its narration from the present to a year ago to 30 years ago it might be construed as undisciplined and difficult to follow by the amateur reader, but the way Joan weaves all the themes together shows her talent to make such mundane events in her life seem part of an overall story. It also really gives credence to the "time is a flat circle" theory where things that happened in the past seem somehow to be running parallel to the present time, like they've always been there and just happened to come sequentially earlier in our minds but doesn't necessarily need to be any order, just things that occurred that could be re-arranged in different ways based on how we remember them.

Perhaps the thoughts of grief and death and manipulating time to better comfort ourselves has influenced my choice in movie tonight: Arrival, with Amy Adams, from what I understand very much about those very same concepts.  It is really a funny thing, this idea of time: Is there really an alien species out there that can harness the passing of time and make different events happen in different sequences? If so I'd like to talk to those aliens (as Amy Adams did) as there's a few things I'd like to change about the past as well as some good memories I'd like to revisit and relive, if just ever so briefly. For now, though, I guess I just have to continue living my Year of Magical Thinking. 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan