Chapter 22 Summary and Analysis

This section begins with an extensive quote from one of Didion's novels, Democracy, in which her character contemplates a belief in the changeability of nature similar to the author's own. She writes that she searched out the quotation following the tsunami that devastated large sections of the Indian Ocean coastline, and adds that she's unable (at the time of writing) to stop imagining the details of that event. At the close of this opening section, she again quotes the Episcopalian prayer.

Didion had the Christmas Eve dinner party she and John always had, able somehow to get through it. She then writes of visiting St. John the Divine, making her way through the crowds of Japanese tourists she says were always there, even at Quintana's wedding and John's funeral. There, she walked out at the specific angle that would enable to...