suspended in a precarious emulsion

 

-------------------- [excerpt from South and West, by Joan Didion] ---------------------------------------- In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology.  

The place is physically dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray:  the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence.  

The crypts above ground dominate certain vistas.  

In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead.  -------------------------- [end / excerpt]

________________________________

How can one comment on this?

(Feel like paraphrasing Steve Martin, saying in exaggerated tones, 

"Well, ex - cuuuuuse me!")

And THAT.  Is how she got to be Joan Didion.

She passed on, two days before Christmas, age 87.

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