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October 17, 2025
from “Slouching towards Bethlehem”
in Slouching towards Bethlehem
by Joan Didion
commentary by Sigrid Nunez
in The Vulnerables
“...we thought Didion might have been played.”—Sigrid Nunez
During our current period of political upheaval we are often assured that our time is not as bad as the violent protests and political assassinations of the sixties. This negative view of the drugs, hippies, and rock music of that time was in part the result of the influential essay “Slouching towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion which compared the era to Yeats’ famous poem in which “the center cannot hold.”
In The Vulnerables, a recent novel by Sigrid Nunez, the main character offers a corrective to this view reminding us that the hippies’ “big dream” was not mayhem but “a more just, peaceful, and beautiful” world order. Nunez’ character—a thin disguise for Nunez herself—and her friends who were assigned the essay in college, believed that Didion was probably pranked by the hippies she interviewed: “We could just picture it: this decidedly unhip Republican in her lady’s skirt and blouse, her stockings and pumps, and carrying a pocketbook, come to San Francisco, where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves ‘hippies,’ on assignment for her conservative, middle-class magazine.”
Normally we don’t run more than one Paragraph of the Week or use a fictional commentary. This week we break both of those conventions—THE
The Paragraphs of the Week
When I finally find Otto he says "I got something at my place that'll blow your mind," and when we get there I see a child on the living-room floor, wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she's wearing white lipstick.
"Five years old," Otto says. "On acid."
The five-year-old's name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten. She lives with her mother and some other people, just got over the measles, wants a bicycle for Christmas, and particularly likes Coca-Cola, ice cream, Marty in the Jefferson Airplane, Bob in the Grateful Dead, and the beach. She remembers going to the beach once a long time ago, and wishes she had taken a bucket. For a year now her mother has given her both acid and peyote. Susan describes it as getting stoned.
I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words.
"She means do the other kids in your class turn on, get stoned," says the friend of her mother's who brought her to Otto's.
"Only Sally and Anne," Susan says.
"What about Lia?" her mother's friend prompts.
"Lia," Susan says, "is not in High Kindergarten."
—Joan Didion
Commentary
When some friends and I first read Didion's essay, as an assignment for one of our college courses, these words, and the fact that Susan does not appear to be at all high, made us think that Otto—along with the friend of Susan's mother—might have been goofing on Didion. We thought this because we knew that goofing on people—especially members of the Establishment, and above all members of the Establishment who were writing about them (at one point Didion acknowledges that she is seen as a "media poisoner," a creature no hippie should even be talking to)—was the kind of behavior the generation was famous for. Pranksterism: counterculture MO....When we told this to our professor, and when we told him we thought Didion might have been played, he assured us that she was much too smart for that to have happened. When we said we had never heard of any hippie giving acid to a little kid, and that we found her essay offensive, the way she made every hippie she met sound either depraved or mental or moronic, he shrugged. Maybe West Coast hippies are different, he said.
—Sigrid Nunez
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A book club for essayists? Yes! Several times a year The Humble Essayist will devote an entire month of features to a book by one major essayist or an issue of a magazine and we invite you to read along. Our first book will be George Orwell: Selected Essays (Oxford). We will run the features during the month of September and encourage you to comment on it online. More to come.—THE
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by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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The Humble Essayist Press
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The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
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