Monthly Archives: November 2009

Sunday night  Nov 22

Anniversary of Kennedy’s death.  36th? no 46th !

Just read about it in Javier Marîas’s new novel which arrived this week–3rd volume in his Trilogy “Your Face Tomorrow” and as soon as it arrived I dropped everything to read it—such a fan of his I’ve become over the past ten years.

If she hadn’t died in that way, [Jayne Mansfield] with the possibly invented details that so fire the rabble’s imagination, she would have been almost completely forgotten.  Kennedy wouldn’t, obviously, if he’d simply suffered a heart attack in Dallas, but you can be quite sure that he would be remembered infinitely less and with only slight emotion if his name were not immediately associated with being gunned down and with various convoluted, unresolved conspiracy theories. That, in essence, is the Kennedy-Mansfield complex, the fear of having one’s life forever marked and distorted by the manner of one’s death, the fear that one’s whole life will come to be viewed as merely an intermediary stage, a pretext, on the way to the lurid end that will eternally identify us.  Mind you, we all run the same risk, even if we’re not public figures, but obscure, anonymous secondary individuals.  We are all witnesses to our own story, Jack.  You to yours and I to mine.’  (29)