I really enjoyed Joan Didion’s piece “Goodbye to All That.” Even though it started out as a description of New York, she made it exciting and suspenseful. I found a line in the middle of the piece that says ” I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.” I think that this was the crux of the Didion’s issue with the city. She fell in love artificially, and the hype, the vibe the people and the smells of New York overwhelmed her so that she could not focus on reality. Didion started out with the notion that she was not going to stay, and after a while when it was clear that she was, she still put herself in denial. It seems as if unless you are born and raised in New York, you only think of it as a romantic dream. Maybe Didion knew this deep inside, and this was the reason that every holiday as the New Yorkers stayed in New York and the West Coasters took a plane, she never really knew where to go.
I personally have had a lot of experience in New York for everyone in my Dad’s family live in New Jersey. We go there every year for alternating Thanksgiving and Christmases, but I have always wondered what it would be like to live there by myself as a young person. I only know New York as a once a year tourist traveling with my parents, and the romance of the city I admit, has always enthralled me. After reading this essay however, I am starting to wonder. If I ever end up living there, the magic of the city will inevitably wear off, I will be stuck with shitty weather, no car, and constant noise. On the other hand, the glamour may not wear off, and my life could be one thousand times more exciting. So my question is, is it okay to “stay too long at the Fair” or should we never get involved in a fantasy because of how it may hurt us in the end?
❤ Kyra
the twelve thirteens 
Joan Didion equates to rather important places in her life to something that we love to go to: New York was “the Fair,” and Los Angeles was “the Coast.” Continuing off of what Kyra said I was also intrigued by the idea of “the Fair,” however I looked at this a little bit differently.
I agree that Didion fell in love with the idea of the city, “but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and the big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable an exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain),” (682 Didion) and this is what kept her there for the first few years. It seems though that as time went on she just couldn’t make up her mind, and that she wasn’t strong enough to push herself either way. Her depression refused to let her move on with her life, she was stuck in the rut that was New York and how she dealt with life. Once she gets married she seems to think this will save her, but she is still deeply depressed. Instead she just stayed until her husband suggested they leave New York and take a vacation. This was in the middle of the despair she couldn’t pull herself out of. Didion doesn’t seem to remember the time between leaving New York and having lived in L.A. for 3 years, but she does seem to feel that she stopped calling L.A. “the Coast,” a long time ago.
Didion’s intense vision of New York left her blind to her situation, and after a while she was unable to leave this perfect vision until her husband could help her. When my cousin from St. Louis came to California she was utterly confused as to why we didn’t go to the beach all the time. At first I remember being irritated that we had to push through the crowds some many times during her stay. Or the constant necessity to make sure she wasn’t drowning (she doesn’t swim), but I realized that just like Didion after a while the magic of a place can be lost.
-Tess
Every Christmas season, when the tree is up and my family sits partially drunk and more-than-partially annoying around it, the same story is told to all. Mom stands up in her oversized pinstripe button-down (yes, the one with the Christmas bears and the angels embroidered on the left pocket… hello ’90′s), points out at the airport-overlooking view from our massive bay windows and giggles on about my first Christmas. She recalls how excited she was to see my 8-monthold reaction to the sparkling Christmas tree in our living room, and how sad she was to see that I didn’t care about it at all; I was so used to the vibrant lights of our view and the city below it that having a 9-foot extension of the twinkles in our living room meant absolutely nothing to me. Of course, this was not intentional on my part, as I’m fairly sure my brain did not have the same capabilities it has now, but my own infantile disregard for such a special, twinkling thing reminded me very much of the point Didion makes in this essay.
Plainly, things get old. Things lost their magic. After so many trips to Disneyland, the characters and the illusions and the animation become real: the magic is lost. After so many years sharing hysterical stories over Turkey and making fun of the way that old woman eats at Thanksgiving dinner, the holiday no longer seems as special: the tradition becomes worn. After years of spending 10 hours placing every ornament on the Christmas try and dressing the house in garland, suddenly you don’t want to do it anymore. And though Didion’s essay isn’t a blatantly sad piece, this idea in itself is heartbreaking: it is the concrete realization that almost nothing is sacred anymore. At first, you have the sense “that something extraordinary [could] happen any minute, any day, any month,” and then it all goes away, just like love, just like passion, just like the fading color of your favorite shirt after constant wash and wear. It’s just as easy to fall in and out of love with a city as it is to feel the same way towards a lover, towards a friend, towards anything in this life. You fall in love with the unfamiliarity, the triumph of discovering new things about someone, the triumph of being a new addition to a magical new world—and then it ends.
In response to Kyra’s question, I don’t think one should ever decide not to get involved in something because they know it will end, because unlike the premise of everything I wrote above, I do still believe in things that are sacred. I believe that there are some things in this life that will always be special to us. And if absence really does make the heart grow fonder and we do have to move from New York to Los Angeles, from San Diego to a college town, from one lover to the next, I think it’s worth it. Because I truly believe that when we come home from college and face all the same people, the same traditions, the same homes that were a part of us before our departure, they will regain the same specialness they had when we were young. Maybe I’m a dreamer, but I have to believe in consistent happiness, in the idea that something can always matter, in the idea that there are some loves that will never go away. Because, if we surrender to the idea that everything ends, like Didion, it will.
Then what will we have to live for?
Joan Didion has a unique, run-on sentence style of writing that surprisingly pieces together flawlessly causing the story to flow with ease and come to life. Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” triggered numerous flashbacks of my summer in New York City and I felt as if she had read my diary before composing this piece. New York City is a fantasy destination; full of lost hope and destroyed aspirations that line the lonely streets. In Didion’s case, her fantasy world waned as she realized that her real life was kicking into gear. I see New York City as a perfect destination for runaways because we miraculously believe that the city lights will somehow eradicate all our so-called problems. When you leave New York City, you expect to turn into a completely different person, like the city will somehow change your perception on life. New York City sure does change you, but in a way that is never expected. Didion states, “I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.” New York City swallows you up into a fantasized dream until you realize that you turn into someone far from initially planned. I decided to go on this summer adventure to New York City because I was considering if I could go off to college far-far away and could handle the hustle and bustle of the East Coast, and believed that this fantasized city was the perfect place to test the waters. I hoped and dreamed that New York City would be a place that would whisk me off my feet and somehow change me in a way, but didn’t realize the amount of depression and loneliness fill up every apartment in the city alike Didion observed. In a place like New York, we imagine a Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle, where our lives seem to magically fall into place with our worries disappearing into thin air, but Didion and I both realized that the magic eventually wears off causing the Big Apple to be a place that we both don’t want to be a part of anymore.
-Maggie
I enjoyed this essay because I thought Didion did a really nice job writing what she wanted to get across, while making it relatable to the reader. A few sentences really stood out to me, especially the first line. “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” This is so true, but I have never really thought about it. In a way, it reminded me of the “Pain Scale” essay because you know you felt the pain, but cannot go back and imagine how much it hurt, the same way you can’t really go back into your memory and find an exact moment when something ended. In “Goodbye to All That,” Didion discusses how her love for New York lessened over the years she lived there. While she is doing so, she is trying to figure out the exact reason for this herself. What I found to be extremely true of a young person is the feelings she had: “it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there.” It is a similar feeling that many of us have had in high school. We went by freshman and sophomore year not really believing that those grades and choices would be seen by colleges, but in reality they could be the deciding factor for that admissions director. Didion later writes, “… it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every mistake, ever word, all of it.” This was her falling point. She had gone through her last eight years believing that life was coming later, but in fact she was just wasting her time.
Do you think everyone goes through a time in their life when they realized the last couple weeks, months, or years were a complete waste?
– Kate
I guess I’ve always been a sucker for pessimism. My dad is in real estate, so consequently he has maintained a dismal view on the housing market ever since I was young. Seven houses in twelve years later, I have been forced to find home in the most temporary of places. In that sense, I understand Didion’s perspective on New York, that the city has taken the role of a flyover state- we pass through it along our journey, but it’s rarely our final destination.
“ I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.”
It’s easy to fall in love with a city, with a town, a home, a person, an idea; but the more we get to know those things the harder it is to stay in love with them. Each home I move into- boxes still beckoning for unpacking, their fragile frames nestled in the corners of unscathed garages and basements- holds a novelty unmatched initially, but ultimately no different than the ones that came before it, and those that will follow. Maybe this is my privileged, upper-middle class ego talking, but these homes I live in blend in with one another. Decks, porches, views, yards, neighbors, have all molded into one clearly clouded shade of nothingness. But what makes them important is the town I’ve grown up in, the same community, the same inner-circle that’s followed me regardless of what bed I’ve found myself sleeping in. As significant as the streets and stands that Didion found herself liking and disliking were in shaping her outlook on New York, it was the people she met and the job she had that shaped her outlook on life. We can move and move and move, but homes are just objects, people are important.
-Jake
After reading the previous blogs, especially Katies and Kyras I think the question at the bottom is why do we live. Why do we do anything when we know that sadness, defeat and rejection lie ahead in some form? I think the answer is love. Or passion, but I feel that passion is just used to describe love for something other than a person. Didion stays in New York because, at least until the end, she loved New York. She says that she “was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again” That was her reason for living their. That was why she subjects herself the the stress and harsh realities of making a living on your own in a big city. When her love for her city dried up she began to love a person. She got married and her love for her husband filled the void left by the city.
As I was thinking about this hypothesis I tried to think of exceptions. People who are happy and don’t have some sort of love in their lives. Men who live in log cabins alone in the woods are probably in love with nature. Artists are in love with their craft. Athletes their sport. An the rest of us their spouses. I do think that there are people who are unhappy and in love but that is inevitable and that unhappiness is most likely temporary.
-Kevin
“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” I loved this line. It was such a good way to start off the story. Didion gave a general statement that tied into the story, but that also allowed the reader to relate to the author’s point. It’s true, in the beginning of anything you’re excited or anxious; these new feelings are usually more memorable. When it comes to the end though, there’s usually mixed feelings, feelings that can’t compare to the original ones, you want to forget that things are ending, or you want to forget the experience as a whole, so it’s harder to see or remember the end. For example, who looks forward to or remembers the exact moment when Christmas is over? No one. The feelings at the end of something so anticipated aren’t as strong and can’t match the excitement of christmas morning.
Something I like about Didion’s writing is that she throws in so many relatable lines. She talks about how everyone wonders what happened to the old them, but they neglect to acknowledge that everyone feels that way at some point in their life. Do you think this can happen more than once in a person’s life? It certainly seems to happen to Didion a few times in the essay. Another technique Didion uses that I admire is when she personalizes her writing to the reader as if it was a conversation: “what I want to tell you”, “what I want to explain to you.”
I also want to point out the transition when she says, “I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was Triborough, and I stayed eight months.” This says so much by saying so little. She sets up the rest of the story by relating back to the idea that “it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair.”, that things lose their initial magic. This idea also relates to the first line with the anticipation in the beginning, and at the end everything is not as memorable and grand as expected.
Did anyone else think of the yellow wallpaper story when she was talking about putting yellow silk over the windows? I just thought that was kind of cool…
I was left with one question at the end though. Didion says that she was in love with New York, yet she has this huge downfall and it drives her to hate the city. Why? I feel like she doesn’t explain that one trigger to the reader.
-Solia
Everything in life eventually ends. No matter how happy we are or how much we have enjoyed it, things come to an end. It is what life is all about but sometimes, it is hard to accept it. When reading Didion, we see her though process of living in a fantasy place that began to loose its charm. New York is a wonderful place to ice skate, drink hot chocolate, and walk around while awing at the skyscrapers. In my opinion, we as humans see many places like Didion sees New York. Whenever we go on vacation, we always imagine living there and how wonderful it would be. But, half of those times, realty strikes and gives us a glimpse of what life would really be like in a vacation setting.
Didion goes though this in her essay when she talks about “the city for only the very young”. It is clear she has a huge passion and love for this city but she does not know how to express it. Didion lets the reader engage in her roller-coaster type thoughts that change between loving to live in New York or hating it and wanting to go somewhere else. It is something very relatable and I appreciate her expressing the real side of living in a “fantasy” city.
A quote that really stuck with me throughout the whole essay was at the beginning. “It is easy to see the beginning of things and harder to see the end.” This sentence I think is perfect for us seniors at this time because as we debate where to go to college we also have to think.. where do we want to spend the next four years? We can imagine going to Colombia and living in Manhattan and having the perfect life we always imagined. But that is not the truth. As the quote says, we only see the beginning of the story, not the end or even the middle.
Another quote that I liked is when Didion says: “It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.” This quote really summarizes the whole essay but also our whole lives. We work so hard to accomplish what we want and to be happy that we are not really living. It is the “romantic” but fake notion that most people live by rather than the true meaning of living rather than existing. It is the hardest thing a human will ever do and Didion is just another person analyzing this and trying to figure things out. BUt will we ever really figure out what it takes ti “live” but be fulfilled and happy at he same time?
-Jacky
“Oh my fucking Jesus, what the hell have I done?” —Stanley Gambucci on New York after reading “Goodbye to That” by Joan Didion
New York is my home. I’m applying to all schools in New York. My dreams are set in the city against its cold Roy Lichtenstein sky. The reality of my future existed within the inked grooves of a one-way ticket to JFK— or at least I thought, until I read Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to That.” Well, I’m still going, mostly because I’m relentlessly stubborn but also party because of a realization I had while reading the piece.
“It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shifting and perishable dream itself.”
This is why I love New York and this is what coaxed Joan into its clutches. We migrate to New York because of the pure fact that New York is everything. New York is the material, worldly, and physical manifestation of my, of her, of the worlds’ dreams. But New York goes beyond dreams, it becomes our aspirations, New York is not just our dreams but their kingdom, the stomping ground for the kings of our aspirations, people who have mastered our dreams in ways we could only, well, dream of. This is why we fall in love with the city, because it is everything we want it to be, everything we want ourselves to be. Once we realize that we have missed the moon, that we cannot have what the diamonds of New York boasts, we fall out of love with the city. Because our dream is New York, our perception of it, the city itself, is shattered in tandem with the dreams it represented. We give up on the city just as we give up on ourselves.
❤ Stanley
Although I have never been to New York, as I was reading this essay I felt like I was there. Didion’s descriptions were so detailed that I felt like I had been there before. I loved her long sentences; there were certain parts of each sentence that stood out to me. Normally for me, I get lost in long sentences and the shorter ones are the ones that stick out. In this essay, I found that the long sentences were the most effective and small parts helped to get the point across. For example, “I stayed eight years,” “why I no longer live in New York,” “I was in a curious position,” “in my case, California,” and “New York was no mere city.” I love how Didion never really explained how she feels about New York. She was so pessimistic at times yet she would say things to balance it out and caused me to think that she really liked living in New York. Why would she stay there for eight years if she hated it? I enjoyed her bland attitude. She was so honest in what she said and she did not exaggerate at all. Her imagery was so relatable. “I liked going to work, liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting out a magazine.” One of my favorite things is the feel and smell of opening a magazine. It reminds me of moments when I have nothing to do and actually have time to spare to read nonsense. “Smells, of course, are notorious memory stimuli.” This surrounds the idea of our food essays; the idea that smells and tastes can take us back to moments in time.
Savannah