Camus @ MindSay

            It all began on Monday. I’d spent the weekend thoroughly engrossed in Albert Camus’s The Stranger – I was eager to discuss the book in class with the most notoriously liberal mind-fuck Professor on campus. In short, the novel revolves around protagonist Monsieur Meursault, an older, simple gentleman who commits what appears to the reader to be an accidental murder. Involved in a scandal not his own, blundering in the sun and encountered with a man and a knife, the trigger on the revolver Meursault has been holding for a friend goes off. The Stranger is dead, and Meursault is tried. In court, he is accused of being unfeeling – not crying only weeks earlier at his own mother’s funeral and showing no signs of physical remorse over the crime he has just committed. In jail, Meursault ponders his crime and his fate – the death penalty. His thoughts reveal that his truest pleasures have been through the physical, visceral joys in life – the feeling of warm water in the ocean washing upon his back, laying next to a woman after having sex, the taste of coffee or cigarettes. If he is to die, Meursault concludes, what does it truly matter? Nothing, he says, matters, in the end, but these moments of unadulterated and un-meditated bliss. We live. We die. If we are happy in the moments of our lives, in the essence of our experiences…nothing else matters.

             What. The. Fuck.

             I raged in class – if nothing in one’s life matters, then what is the point of living? Why continue on with the drone of a life which promises only the taste of chocolate or orgasms as its instant, and fleeting rewards?

             A boy with a distressed briefcase and holey jeans leaned forward to me. “You have it backwards,” he coaxed, “when nothing matters, everything matters. By not focusing on what is significant in one’s life, everything becomes significant.”

            My mind was racing. Only hours before I had written not only my ambitions for my life, but the intricate details which I hoped would encompass such a life. Wilting flowers in the foyer of my city apartment and love sprawled on post-it notes above my unused stove. I was sickening to myself. Not only is much of my thinking devoted to the promise of the future, I realized, but much of my day-to-day existence relies upon the fact that something better is awaiting me and that my current efforts are solely for the purpose of achieving such a future.

           Skinny boy piped up again:

           “And, by the way, Meursault didn’t even talk about orgasms – he talked about sex itself. The bliss of sex, and of feeling a body next to his, of feeling happy. He didn’t have sex to achieve an orgasm, he had sex for the experience.”

          I couldn’t even get fucking fucking right!

          And I actually wonder why I am constantly finding myself in a state of disappointed bewilderment?

         What does it mean to be a girl with “big dreams?” As a self-proclaimed romantic, I often fantasize the grandeur of future events, instantly boosting their enticement factor. What if these dreams are only successful in one thing – making my life as far from grand as possible?

          As classmates continued on, my mind stumbled through past memories. Hikes at summer camp. Kisses from boys on Carribean islands. Compliments from random, fellow Subway passengers. Winning a writing award in a competition I just barely entered. Friendships with boys which have turned into relationships with boys. A plane ride at age 13 to France when I was terrified of flying, and of being alone. Picking apples with a group of smiling, dirty friends and not caring that my new designer jeans were dragging through wormy mud. Staying up all night talking in college to that kid you don’t know. Seeing the movie you've heard no reviews of which later becomes your favorite flick. Finding the last pair of heels in your size on the sale rack in the very back of the store. The three best friends in my life who were all, ironically, once enemies. Riding a donkey up a mountain in Santorini, Greece. Re-connecting with old friends, old loves, old cities.

        All of the best things in my life have happened to me when I’ve least expected them to.

        My head still reeling, I stumbled into Journalism class. While typing notes aimlessly, the lights went out in our lecture hall. Doors slammed. A campus-wide power outage was declared, and we all eagerly rushed outside into the California sun, giggling over missed quizzes. I pedaled back to my apartment and was met, inside, by complete darkness.

        “Do you know what’s up?” I asked my roommate, Beth, as I licked the Weight Watchers Ice Cream pop I hoped to salvage from melting in the now warm freezer. Our apartment was jarringly dark and Beth called her father in Hawaii. I sat on the couch, listening to sirens slur by outside.

       “My dad says a Pakistani terrorist is threatening to blow up Los Angeles,” she replied, blankly.

        My stomach lurched. I immediately felt trapped inside of my apartment: with no news outlet and no method of transportation, I knew I couldn’t escape. Visions of panic passed through my mind: billows of smoke appearing outside of my window, the ceiling crumbling onto my head, and my beautiful books and letters hidden amongst piles of rubble. Melodramatic as it may have been, I quickly imagined dying on that very day, at age 19. It figures, I thought, that I would have had such thoughts about how poorly I’d lived my life recently that it would all come to an end.

         Thirty minutes later the power was back on and the rumors were dissuaded.

         I called my dad in tears.

         “I’m always thinking about my future, daddy,” I mumbled, “and I’m scared I’m always going to be disappointed with where I end up.”

        “It’s not purely negative to be forward thinking,” The Voice of Reason replied, “after all, what would you do if you decided to live completely in the moment? Sit on a beach all day and tan and fuck? [Okay, he didn’t actually say fuck.] You would become hedonistic, and that’s only fun for so long.”

         Valid point. One for you, Dad. He continued:

         “Besides, why do you think the people who are successful get to those pinnacles? They have goals and ambitions and things they want, and this is why they get them. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you wanting things in your future, and thinking about how you can attain these things. In fact, I think that’s why you’ve come so far already.”

         Now he was starting to sound like a Father Figure. While his example held validity, I also heard the echo of a man who, understandably, wants me to achieve all he believes I am capable of. Parents living through their children, all of that weird, innate psychological shit.

         “Anyway,” he finished, “you’re not really always disappointed, are you?”

          Well, I wanted to blurt out, yes, dad, I am! College really fucked me up last year. It was nothing like I thought it would be. And Los Angeles? A vapid sea of smog. Perhaps still mysterious, but nothing glimmering and worthy of dreams since age 13. Acting? Fuck that – I was accepted into the Annenberg School of Journalism here this past weekend as well. The people I’ve met here? Never comparable to my old hippies – or at least even beginning to enter that realm until this year. And love? Ha, I wanted to laugh, when the fuck have my elaborate fantasies about love ever come true?

        I woke up the next morning: Tuesday, September 13th, the calendar read. A new Vanity Fair was out! I geeked out and finished applying my eyeshadow more quickly so I could steal away to the bookstore for 10 minutes before class to pick up the new issue.

       I had my disgustingly boring Los Angeles history class next, and non-chalantly blocked out the ramblings of our inane professor as I flipped through the latest issue, which was hidden covertly on my lap. (I have now realized, P.S., that V.F. is my crack. I divulge it like Mary-Kate does laxatives.)

       After perusing through a decent cover story on Paris Hilton, I flipped to a story crudely deemed “Cancer Memoir. P. 208.” With nothing more than a histrionic title, I began the story and quickly became immersed in it. The author, Marjorie Williams, was a middle-aged women who spoke poignantly about her triflings with cancer – her writing moved me so deeply that I found my hands tapping the desk loudly as I read. My desk-mate a seat over threw me a crude look. Williams spoke of time:

      “Time, I understand, used to be a shallow concept to me. There was the time you occupied, sometimes anxiously, in the present (a deadline in three hours, a dentists’ appointment for which you were 10 minutes late); and there was your inarticulate sense of time’s grander passage, and the way it changes with age.

         Now time has levels of meaning. For example, I have clung for a year and a half to a friends’ observation that young children experience time in a different way from adults. Since a month can seem an eternity to a child, then every month I manage to live might later teem with meaning and memory for my children. This totem is all I need during times when my pockets are otherwise empty of wisdom or strength.

        Since I was diagnosed, I have had an eternity of time—at least six times as much as I was supposed to have—and sometimes I think that all the time has been gilded with my knowledge of its value.”

        As I read, our Professor simultaneously spoke of time – “Augustine once said that time is a a present of things past: memory, a present of things present: sight, and a present of things future: expectation,” he recited.

        Time, I was learning, was experienced always in the present. The present, however, had the possibility to fully encompass the current moment…although most of it, however, was not usually occupied by the momentary happenings, but rather through memories (or visions – sight, of the past) or expectations for the future. Marjorie Williams’ words somehow seemed louder than Augustine’s. “A month can seem like an eternity for a child,” she wrote. This, I thought, was a beautiful suggestion…that we should, and can enjoy a prolonged and current state of happiness like a child, if only we wish to.

       The world was screaming at me: THIS IS YOUR TIME, AMY, AND WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING WITH IT?

        And what is the eeriest part of all of this, you might ask? In my first week of school, my History of News and Media Professor asked us all to write obituaries about our lives. Despite my mind’s constant meanderings into the future, I was being assigned, for once, to place onto my paper the goals and hopes I had for my life, in the grander sense.

         I googled obituaries of Vanity Fair writers. The Washington Post quickly surfaced: author and mother Marjorie Williams had died in her late 40s. Her life seemed not glamorous but true and somehow tragic.

        “Marjorie Williams, 47, a Washington Post columnist known for her elegantly crafted essays on American society and fearless profiles of the political elite, died of cancer Jan. 16 at her home in Washington.

         Ms. Williams produced definitive journalism across a range of forms, from short essays to in-depth magazine pieces. Ms. Williams was an editor of great promise in her twenties and became a piercing portraitist of Washington power in her thirties, writing profiles of government and media leaders for The Post and Vanity Fair magazine.

        A portrait by Ms. Williams was seen as a ritual signifying that a person had reached the center of the political universe. First came the charm, then the withering scalp-to-toenails examination under her all-seeing eye. Her conclusions were published for millions to read in keen and crystal prose.

       She profiled everyone from Bill Clinton to James A. Baker, Al Gore to Colin L. Powell, Larry King to George Stephanopoulos, from archetypal insider Clark Clifford to upstart moneyman Terry McAuliffe. Her portraits blended microscopic observations and universal conclusions as a sort of Plutarch's "Lives" for an end-of-millennium Washington.

       Liver cancer was diagnosed in July 2001. Ms. Williams turned a prognosis measured in months into a stoic and good-humored campaign for nearly four years, hard-won time that she lavished on her husband, journalist Timothy Noah, and their children, Will and Alice.

      The shelf-life of newspapers generally is measured in hours or days, of magazines perhaps in weeks; Ms. Williams was the rare journalist whose best lines and sharpest insights are still fresh in the minds of fans.

Hiatt, for example, instantly recalled her observation in a column from March 2000: "In years of writing about political figures, I have heard the friends and associates of a really striking number of men offer, as proof of the great men's warmth and cuddliness, that when their children call during work hours, they actually take the calls."

      The guts to call a fixer a fixer, no matter how many history books he might figure in, and the craftsmanship to do it with eloquence, and the brains to make it stick -- those were the main guns in her arsenal. "She had an extraordinary concern for getting it right, not just in the details, but in the context," according to former Post Magazine editor Bob Thompson. Simply having her byline on cover stories was enough to rivet the attention of official Washington, Thompson said.

      She had a one-of-a-kind résumé to match her distinctive voice. The path she trod -- seemingly casual, yet in retrospect supremely efficient -- served for many colleagues to underline the idea that there could be only one Marjorie Williams.

     She became a voracious reader and satisfied three years of Harvard requirements in just two academic years. But she was unhappy at college. She dropped out after her junior year and landed a job in New York as assistant to editor Joni Evans. Evans discovered that Ms. Williams "had practically read everything before I ever met her."

     "She was complicated," Evans said. "Very sure of her own goals. She didn't need the outside approval of others."

     "Marjorie was one of the finest Washington reporters I know," Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter said. "She combined the political and the social aspects of the place in a way that was seamless, and she often did it without being granted access to her subjects."

     Her byline appeared in various publications over portraits, character studies, essays, book reviews and online exchanges. She wrote trenchantly on topics ranging from the presidency to parenthood, from Julia Child to Jennifer Lopez. She ran the octaves from trivia to timelessness with speed and harmony. She could do funny and wise and sad all in the same paragraph, with no seams showing.

     Many more people liked Ms. Williams than could easily explain her, for she defied easy categories. Her prose was razor-sharp, her personality gentle. Her mind was relentless, her manner good-natured. Her standards were exacting, her impulse forgiving. She was by nature the center of most rooms she entered, yet preferred to draw out others, to listen.

     "This was a woman," her friend and Post colleague Ruth Marcus said, "who could be intimidated by her nanny, then turn around and skewer the secretary of state."

     Said former Post executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee: "She had that miracle touch. She made people feel so good -- about life and the paper and everything."

     During her illness, she wrote occasional op-ed pieces that sometimes touched on the ordeal, but always as an illumination of a larger point. Her final column, published Nov. 3, reflected on what she knew was likely her last Halloween. She described her third-grader dressed up in a rock star costume; in that bittersweet glimpse, Ms. Williams divined the young woman she would not live to know.

     Ms. Williams faced her death open-eyed. She had watched her mother die, and afterward she wrote: "You bear the unbearable, in the orbit of a loved one's death, because you have to. . . . Death is the one matter that is out of our hands."

     Neither a romance nor a melodrama; just the truth. Truth was, to the end, the thing she handled best.”

            Her achievements and the words written about her so moved me that I modeled the assignment after her very own life. My obituary reads:

            Amy K, 101, a writer known for her inimitable voice and evocative profiles, collapsed while dancing at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party this past Saturday and later died at her West Coast home in the Hollywood Hills. Known for her spunk and presence within the media circle, Kaufman was escorted away by paramedics as well as her loving husband of 75 years.

            The public last saw her dressed in a magnificent black Prada ballroom gown. “She looked astonishing,” noted four-time Oscar winner and friend Natalie Portman, “and that’s how she’d wish for us to remember her.”

           K. produced significant journalism throughout the medium, from her notoriously read in-depth portrait pieces and later to her sassy weekly column in the Los Angeles Times. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California, and immediately went on to earn her Masters of Science from the Columbia University School of Journalism. After studying at Columbia, K. resided in New York until she founded a lasting relationship with Vanity Fair magazine. Recognized as a writer of great promise even in her twenties, Amy became a regular contributor to the magazine at just twenty-six. She gained notoriety from some of her earliest and most subversive work, much of which fearlessly detailed the lives of celebrity firebrands of the era.

         A portrait by Ms. K.was seen as a rite of passage not necessarily signifying success, but public intrigue. Kaufman not only had a way with words, but with her subjects. As an interviewer, she was recognized for the way in which even the coldest of high-profile figures learned to trust her. At only 5 foot, one inch, Kaufman was known among the journalism community for her habit of later becoming friends with the subjects of her articles.

        Amy profiled everyone from Julia Roberts to Bill Clinton, Brad Pitt to Larry King, Donald Trump to Tom Cruise, loud-mouthed Oprah to the secretive Bob Dylan. Kaufman’s profiles, which always opened with apt physical description, later detailed often macabre details of some of the time’s most notable public figures in a way which was, ironically, endearing. 

       “She’s brazen as hell,” late Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter once wrote of K. in his opening editorial, “but she’s one of our best.”

       K. didn’t only write about the Hollywood mix, however – in fact, much of the writer’s work was devoted to exposing the most everyday of America. One of her most memorable pieces featured the story of her date with a New York taxi cab driver named Ed. “He smelled of torn leather and candy roasted peanuts,” she wrote, “but he kissed like a regular Clark Gable.”

      K. is also recognized for her short, yet memorable acting stint during the 30’s. Though her talent was noticed by many within the industry, K. starred in only seven films, four of which were independently released. She wrote extensively about her interest in old Hollywood figures Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, and often commented upon her wish to emulate them in her own life.

      Transfixed by the origin of the illusion surrounding Los Angeles, K. devoted much of her adult life writing a book devoted to debunking the mysterious city she inhabited for much of her life. The work, whose publication is set for next month, has received critical acclaim not only for its unique views, but for its uncommon style. K. writes in the first person, while incorporating voices from interviews she conducted throughout her life. K. kept all of her interviews transcribed on page under lock and key at a vault which is still undisclosed.

      Although in love with LA, K. always remained faithful to her hometown of Boston, Massachusetts. She frequently spent year-long stretches at the VF headquarters in London, and later at the newest office in Paris, France. Despite her distaste for flying, K. loved to travel and did so up until last month, when she and her husband celebrated their 75th anniversary in Bora Bora, Fiji.

      “She was tragically complicated,” mentor and novelist Joyce Carol Oates once wrote of Ms. K., “even though her life was hardly tragic.”

       “I want to be somebody,” K. wrote at age 13 in her diary, which was published by Simon & Schuster on her 60th birthday, “because somebodies are loved.”

       World, I hear you loud and clear. I want to change, but I don’t know how…or even if I am capable of such. How can I simply erase all forward thinking notions from my mind – and do I want to? Is it even fathomable, in this day and age, for an affluent college student to be entertaining the ideas of a life free of responsibility and intellectual duty? Probably not. I’m assuming that despite all of the odd coincidences of the past few days, I won’t go about consciously changing much of anything in my life. In fact, I’m sure I won’t change the way I go about anything.

           I truly hope, however, that I have the power to change the way I go about thinking about my experiences. I am here now. How do I enjoy being here? What do I have to do to make this place a place where I am happy? Who can I surround myself with to make me happy? How can I be the kind of person who people want to be around – how can I make my friends, and the people I care about happy? What little things do I enjoy that make me happy that I often don’t appreciate – phone calls, cuddling, ice cream, the new fuckin’ issue of Vanity Fair – can I savor these things, can they make me happy? What can I do, daily, when I wake up, to realize – hey, time just passed, I’m still here, and that is something to be happy about? 

          In the end, what do all of the cosmic interactions of this past week mean? Perhaps, in the end, it will not be the dancing at the Oscar Party I hope to attend that so entices me but rather the dance itself; the man who twirls me around. I am most usually thrilled by spontaneity because of the people it throws at me – ones whom I have no way of anticipating, who change and affect me in ways I could have never imagined. Maybe, in the end, I am one of these people, too. Perhaps, if I don’t fixate upon the image of the woman I will become, this woman, in turn will surprise me with her very own character.