"Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

Joan Didion admits to being attracted to extremes of personality.

• October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.
• The stones look not like natural stones but like the rubble of some unmentioned upheaval.
• San Bernardino.. where it is routine to misplace the future and easy to start looking for it in bed.
• ..the movies of the late 1930's, all the dreams in which violence and threats and blackmail are made to seem commonplace of middle-class life... The revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.
• a slight, intermittently pretty woman
• Although Miss Baez does not actually talk this way when she is kept from the typewriter, she does try, perhaps unconsciously, to hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own or of anyone's adolescence.
• Camrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A.(M.-L.): he is rigidly committed to an immutable complex of dctorine, including the notions that the traditional American Communist Party is a "revisionist bourgeois clique."
• He believes with Mao that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, a point he insists upon with blazing and self-defeating candor.
• (whose) dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people.
•  The world Michael Laski had constructed for himself was one of labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity, a world made meaningful not only by high purpose but by external and internal threats, intrigues and apparatus, and immutably ordered world in which things mattered.
• You see what the world of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.
• Hughes never has business "transactions," or "negotiations"; he has "missions".
• T.W.A., a company which, as Hughes ran it, bore an operational similarity only to the government of Honduras
• (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power).. but (want to buy with money) absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.