Joan Didion went to Haight-Ashbury in 1967 expecting the counterculture and found something more disturbing: people genuinely coming apart, and no one in charge of the narrative. She reported what she saw without taking a stance. This refusal is its own form of understanding.

Empathy is not usually the first word that comes to mind with Joan Didion. Her characteristic register is cool, precise, slightly dissociated — the prose of someone who notices everything and reassures no one. Her sentences accumulate detail without resolving it, clause after clause held together by sheer syntactic force, mirroring the experience of trying to maintain coherence in a world that keeps threatening to come apart. This is not the voice of someone projecting warmth onto her subjects. It is the voice of someone looking very steadily at what is actually there.

And yet Slouching Towards Bethlehem belongs here, precisely because of this quality. What Didion practises in these essays is something more demanding than sympathetic identification. It is structural immersion: the willingness to enter a scene completely, to stay inside it without the protection of irony or retrospective wisdom, to report what she finds without telling the reader what to feel about it. That refusal to manage the reader's response is, in its own way, a form of respect — for the complexity of what she is observing and for the intelligence of whoever is reading.

The title essay is the clearest demonstration. Didion spent weeks in Haight-Ashbury in the summer of 1967, among the runaways and the dropouts and the people dispensing acid with the cheerful authority of true believers. She was not there to celebrate the counterculture or to condemn it. She was there to see it. What she found was not the dawning of the Age of Aquarius but something more troubling and more specific: a community that had abandoned the structures that make coherent selfhood possible — family, continuity, cause and effect — and replaced them with a rhetoric of liberation that left its youngest members genuinely unprotected. The five-year-old given acid by her parents. The teenager who has been on the road so long she no longer knows what she was running from. Didion reports these details without horror and without comfort.

This is where she connects to the Bourdieu framing — the warning against the empathy that places itself in another's position and, in doing so, substitutes its own experience for theirs. Didion never makes that mistake. She is acutely aware of her own position — a product of a specific class and a specific set of assumptions, watching a world she did not come from and cannot entirely enter. That awareness of distance is built into the prose. It is what keeps her observations honest.

The same method extends to cover the broader cultural landscape of the 1960s — the California of John Wayne movies and suburban self-invention, the America of Alcatraz and Howard Hughes and women who stay in bad marriages and cannot quite say why. What holds them together is a certain sensibility: the conviction that the details, reported accurately and without consolation, will tell you more than any argument about what a moment in history actually felt like to live inside.

Griffin Dunne's documentary The Center Will Not Hold (2017) follows Didion in her eighties, looking back at the work with the same unsentimental precision she brought to everything else. She is not nostalgic. She does not soften the past or perform wisdom about it. She remembers clearly and says what she remembers. It is the most Didion thing imaginable, and it confirms what the essays always suggested: that the quality she brought to her subjects she also brought to herself, without favour or protection.