THE COURAGE OF TURTLES - Central Washington University

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Orwell 18 language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase—some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse—into the dustbin where it belongs.
Didion 19 JOAN DIDION ON GOING HOME Joan Didion (b. 1934– ), a native Californian, has written novels, screenplays, and essays. Her collections of essays include Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). In her book, Salvador (1983), she recounts her visit to the troubled <strong>Central</strong> American nation. In the following personal essay from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she describes the emotional problems that arise in a visit to her childhood home, problems which are perhaps compounded by the presence of her husband and daughter. Iam home for my daughter's first birthday By “home” I do not mean the house in Los Angeles where my husband and I and the baby live, but the place where my family is, in the <strong>Central</strong> Valley of California. It is a vital although troublesome distinction. My husband likes my family but is uneasy in their house, because once there I fall into their ways, which are difficult oblique, deliberately inarticulate, not my husband's ways. We live in dusty houses ( “D-U-S-T,” he once wrote with his finger on surfaces all over the house, but no one noticed it) filled with mementos quite without value to him (what could the Canton dessert plates mean to him? how could he have known about the assay scales, why should he care if he did know?), and we appear to talk exclusively about people we know who have been committed to mental hospitals, about people we know who have been booked on drunk-driving charges, and about property, particularly about property, land, price per acre and C-2 zoning and assessments and freeway access. My brother does not understand my husband's inability to perceive the advantage in the rather common real-estate transaction known as “sale-leaseback” and my husband in turn does not understand why so many of the people he hears about in my father's house have recently been committed to mental hospitals or booked on drunk-driving charges. Nor does he understand that when we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about the things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in. We miss each other's points, have another drink and regard the fire. My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as “Joan's husband.” Marriage is the classic betrayal. Or perhaps it is not any more. Sometimes I think that those of us who are now in our thirties were born into the last generation to carry the burden of “home,” to find in family life the source of all tension and drama. I had by all objective accounts a “normal” and a “happy” family situation, and yet I was almost thirty years old before I could talk to my family on the telephone without crying after I had hung up. We did not fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges
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