The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Read Online Free PDF Page A

love, uncomplaining, all-forgiving. My facial structure is hers; my eyes; certain traits of personality. (Sense of humor from my father; satirical & artistic interests. A certain silly playfulness. From my mother patience, affection, energy, absorption in other people…. ) In my dreams my grandmother, both dead and “alive,” is always silent. I wake from these dreams with a terrible sense of loss…also with a sense of being loved, cherished, valued…of having a definite place in the universe.
     
    (A pity that the recording of essentially happy events seems, in a journal, self-congratulatory.)
     
    September 7, 1973. …Excitement of new semester. The usual difficulties with the bookstore…too many students in one class…exhilaration, tending toward mania.
     
    At home, an attack of tachycardia that left me breathless and exhausted. It lasted more than an hour, during which I had plenty of time to think of…of the usual things…of having lived, of being prepared to die, of being thrust out of the temporal dimension altogether as if thrust out of the body…. Saw splashes of light, mainly orange. Vivid visual “memories.” A peculiar sort of euphoria. (As if already dead…?) At thirty-five I feel ready to die, to pass on to another plane of existence; but I’m fully aware of how absurd this sounds. When I had my first attack at the age of eighteen, at Syracuse, I was terrified; I didn’t want to die; I struggled against it, nearly suffocating. The second attack took place in a gym class—a girl had run into me, hard, while we were playing basketball—and was so bad I had to be taken to the infirmary. I remember turning the pages of Boswell’s Life of Johnson , trying to read. Tears in my eyes because, while I wasn’t in pain, I thought I might die…. The next attack was easier emotionally and psychologically. An attack I had at Wisconsin, once, while coughing violently, left me exhausted and drained and other-worldly. (A girl who thought I was going to die, was soupset herself that she fainted…. ) Now the attacks are as surprising as always, but not as frightening. I lie down and wait for them to pass. They are quite infrequent—once a year, perhaps—and no longer have the power to terrify. If you imagine you’re going to die once, and give up, the second time you give up immediately, and without a struggle there’s no terror.
     
    Curious sort of euphoria. I wonder if others have experienced this….
     
    Afterward, very tired; but a sense of peacefulness, satisfaction.
     
    September 10, 1973. …Excitement of new classes seems more intense than usual in the dept. We are all children….
    […]
     
    (Days filled with “new” people, mainly students. Their focus on me as “Joyce Carol Oates”—circus-like atmosphere. Oddly draining.)
    […]
     
    October 27, 1973. …Joint professorships offered Ray and me by Syracuse; * sad to be forced to decline them.
     
    Do With Me What You Will published. Quite a risk, offering myself like that; a work so intimate in terms of feelings, experience. Never again, probably. Not worth it.
    […]
     
    To be unmoved by excellent reviews: this isn’t normal. I can see that this past year of meditation is having the result of diminishing my emotions generally. Whether it’s good or bad or merely necessary I can’t know…. Detachment from “maya.” Danger of no return.
     
    (Comparable to the detachment from one’s own life experienced during tachycardia. The queer euphoria that arises when one gives up.)
     
    The person one is , one would not wish to write about. As a novelist one must value eccentricity, passion, paradox, nuisance, surprise, reversals, exasperating pity…. Anyone in whom the life-force is lovely & criminal. Gathering to frenzy.
     
    Victims of their own passion?—saviors of others? Unclear.
     
    November 10, 1973. …Disturbing “anticipatory” dream re. Gail Godwin, whom I’ve never met. Uncanny; almost unpleasant. I had the dream, and