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Today, we are never just looking at the Bevatron.

This collection includes “Why I Write,” a straightforward accounting of Didion’s craft adapted from a lecture she gave at Berkeley, wherein she looks up at the Bevatron, the particle accelerator at the Lawrence Berkeley lab.

“When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the Bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong,” she says.

“I was only wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.”

How desperately Didion wanted us to believe she was just “looking” at the Bevatron.