I was sure it was out there somewhere.
I first read that paragraph over 30 years ago, when Didion's book was still new.
My favorite Los Angeles freeways weren't those in that particular passage, but
it was easy in that description to find many similarities to other freeways I
was familiar with. I don't, however, have a copy of Play it as it Lays
(a novel) on my shelves, and when I tried to find this particular text I made
the mistake of assuming that it was from another book by Joan Didion, a collection
of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Rather logically, flipping pages
through that book didn't bring me to the desired passage. As might be expected,
whenever I ran web searches to try to find a web page that included "freeway"
and "Didion" and "Slouching", the text I wanted also didn't
show up. A number of years ago I sent mail to someone who maintained a site with
many references to Joan Didion, asking him if he could find the passage for me.
He was quite willing to try, but told me that at that time his book collection
was in transit from a previous to a new residence, and only when he got settled
and unpacked would he be able to look for what I wanted. As often happens, he
apparently never got around to looking.
Finding the passage now was, I suppose, the result of a lucky guess. Instead of
including some reference to Slouching Toward Bethlehem in my search, I
limited myself to "freeway" and "Didion", and the names of
a couple of freeways. And it turned out that about a handful of people had been
as impressed with the text as I was, and found a reason to post it on their sites.
And so it happened that I finally found the passage, and was able to read, and
enjoy, it, again.
Go to: A superhighway without information, or
Go to: Fort PC.