Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The Question of self-pity. Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Notes on change.doc”) reads “May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.,” but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two after the fact. For a long time I wrote nothing else. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
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The Year of Magical Thinking,
Joan Didion