If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.

Joan Didion, Morning After The Sixties, 1970

I just finished reading The White Album by Joan Didion. I have read a couple of other books of her essays, and of course I read everything she writes for the New York Review of Books.