I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I
was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was
meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw:
flash pictures in variable sequences, images with no
“meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a
movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would
probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to
believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s
intelligibility, but to know that one could change the
sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the
experience as rather more electrical than ethical.
- Joan Didion, “The White Album”