At its simplest, such the sage's admission of weakness admission can take the form of presenting the author's surroundings as she writes, something Didion does in the opening of "On Morality:"

As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back. With the help of the ice cubes I have been trying to think, ;because The American Scholar asked me to, in some abstract way about 'morality,' a word I distrust more every day, but my mind veers inflexibly toward the particular. [Slouching towards Bethlehem]

Didion continues by mentioning the particulars of an automobile accident nearby and then shows how they contain information about morality, her stated subject. The point is that she begins by revealing the physical and psychological setting within which she writes. She claims in this way to tell the truth, the whole truth.

A related means of supplying the context of one's own ideas involves presenting a thumbnail self-portrait that purports to provide a frank survey of one's essential qualities. Didion's "In the Islands" makes use of this technique, familiar since Montaigne, of informing the reader about the author's strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, to provide a sense of context for her ideas. After narrating how she, her husband, and her daughter sit in their Honolulu hotel and wait for news of an expected tidal wave, she adds that she has come to Hawaii instead of filing for divorce, after which she explains that she has related these intimate facts "because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting" (White Album, 133).

Like Mailer, who begins by presenting his own shortcomings as a reporter, Didion frankly, almost aggressively, thrusts her potential shortcomings as a truth-teller upon the reader. The weaknesses each chooses to exploit, however, suggest what differentiates male and female applications of the sage's ethos -- and what, therefore, can differentiate the works of men and women who write as sages. In "Letter from Paradise," which contains her poignant ruminations upon Hawaii as a place of loss, Didion admits to such extreme emotionality (conventionally, if not in reality, a woman's weakness) that she cannot observe what she has come to report. The occasion is her trip on one of the bright pink tour boats that take the visitor to the sites of several sunken warships that still lie in Pearl Harbor. After describing the way the tour begins in a "kind of sleazy festivity," she mentions that at first amid such surroundings "it is hard to remember what we came to remember. "

And then something happens. I took that bright pink boat to Pearl Harbor on two afternoons, but I still do not know what I went to find out, which is how other people respond a quarter of a century later. I do not know because there is a point at which I begin to cry, and to notice no one else. I begin to cry at the place where the Utah lies in fifty feet of water, water neither turquoise nor bright blue here but the grey of harbor waters everywhere, and I did not stop until after the pink boat had left the Arizona, or what is visible of the Arizona the rusted after-gun turret breaking the grey water, the flag at full mast because the navy considers the Arizona still in commission, a full crew aboard, 1,102 men from forty-nine states. All I know about how other people respond is what I am told that everyone is quiet at the Arizona. (Slouching towards Bethlehem, 192)

In her attempt to demonstrate why the attack on Pearl Harbor was the single most indelible event" to her generation, as the assassination of John F. Kennedy was to people only slightly younger, Didion's confession of being blinded by tears unexpectedly serves to create ethos. For what matters, really, is not precisely how others react to the sites of such loss but that Didion feels sincerely and authentically and that she has the courage to share her feelings with us even when they threaten to cast doubt upon her abilities as a reporter of objective truth. Paradoxically, rather than weaken her hold upon her audience, such confession strengthens it by convincing us that she is trustworthy. Such confession has the further effect of expanding (or redefining) the sage's ethos, for her attempt to win credibility by admitting to a supposedly feminine weakness becomes, as we have seen, a means of presenting that emotionality as strength. At the same time, such emotional sensitivity becomes a mark of the sage herself.

Such elaborate self-presentation, which often involves narrative, differs from those techniques used to create ethos that are essentially rhetorical topoi. When Ruskin and Thoreau use the "I am forced to speak out against my will" or the "As I was walking down the street" commonplaces, they do so to open an argument effectively or to make transitions within one. Didion's more elaborate dramatization of supposed weakness has a different, more central purpose, since it intermingles with her main theme. Her narrative representation of extreme emotionality thus simultaneously works to establish her credibility while presenting the ideas and attitudes that credibility is meant to guarantee.

Another main version of this basic technique for creating ethos, of which Didion also provides a modern example, emphasizes intellectual rather than emotional weakness. Again, the often detailed presentation required to turn such admissions of flaws into strengths permits (and occasionally forces) the writer into making it the central structure of a work. For instance, "On Keeping a Notebook," which employs this version of the confessional mode, begins by advising the reader that Didion has never kept one "to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking" because that would require "an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess" (Slouching towards Bethlehem, 133). Once again, what begins as a confession of weakness is intended to end up implying strength. Didion's subsequent confession that she has trouble retaining facts and also lives in a slovenly manner quickly transforms itself into a claim that she deals instead with higher imaginative truths. Thus her notebook, which contains bits and snippets of overheard conversations, eccentrically observed phenomena, and other apparently trivial facts, turns out -- are we surprised? -- to justify her claims to high intellect and imagination: "What is a recipe for sauerkraut doing in my notebook? What kind of magpie keeps this notebook? 'He was born the night the Titanic went down.' That seems a nice enough line, and I even recall who said it, but is it not really a better line in life than it could ever be in fiction?" (138). In fact, that is exactly the point of her notebook entries -- not that they provide data upon which to base her writings but rather that they provide tags, brief spots of time, that allow her to retrieve her past and hence be a coherent human being. After claiming that "it all comes back" to her, she explains that this ability to maintain contact with one's past selves is absolutely necessary.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. [139].

Such assertions of her own ability to retrieve her past from such fragments of language and image both authenticate her claims to know herself, her claims to ruthless honesty, and also demonstrate her courage and wisdom. To her it all comes back, Didion tells us. Even an old sauerkraut recipe bears significance since it dates back to a time, a particular night, she wishes to preserve: "I was on Fire Island when I first made that sauerkraut, and it was raining, and we drank a lot of bourbon and ate the sauerkraut and went to bed at ten, and I listened to the rain and the Atlantic and felt safe" (141). Like Ruskin's quoting in Modern Painters and Fors Clavigera from diaries and letters written years and even decades earlier, Didion's public examination of her notebooks goes far to establishing her claims as a truth-teller. Here is a person, we are supposed to realize, who cares about getting it right, a person who wants to know the truth about herself. Here is a person, so goes the implicit claim, whom we can trust. In addition, such citation of autobiographical data not only demonstrates the writer's sincerity, openness, and courageous honesty, it also demonstrates Didion's ability at interpretation and retrieval. Like Newman, Ruskin, Lawrence, and others who make frequent use of such autobiographical data, Didion commits us to a literature of experience and lends us her own memories and experiences.

The White Album, Didion's collage of Californian images from the late 1960s, exemplifies her most important and most successful use of autobiographical data in such a literature of experience. From the point of view of one studying the modern sage's attempts to create ethos, The White Album also exemplifies perhaps her most important use of intellectual weakness both to claim intellectual strength and to make the points that claim ultimately supports. Such thematized technique makes its appearance in the opening paragraphs when she tells us, "I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling" (White Album, 11). As it turns out, then, Didion has chosen these images because for her they capture the experiences of 1966-71, which she takes to be a crucial turning point in the life of herself and her time. Like Ruskin, Carlyle, Newman, and a host of nineteenth-century predecessors, Didion as sage elects to make a crisis, a crisis survived, the test case by which she can explain -- impose another story upon events for the sake of her reader. Taking herself as paradigm like Newman and these other writers of what have come to be termed "conversion narratives," Didion offers her own experience as a Sign of the Times.' These are the events, she tells us, that puzzled her. These are the events for which she could not find or invent the "right" story.

In the manner consecrated by so many Victorians, she presents her crisis as significant, as immediately relevant, to us. Unlike Carlyle or Ruskin, she does not, however, use biblical imagery to suggest the archetypal nature of her experience, for unlike them, although she may perceive herself in an all too common situation, she finds no solace, no usefulness, in figuring herself forth as an Ishmael, as an Israelite wandering in the desert, or as a person trying to gain admission to the ark. In her words, such analogies are not "workable"; they do not explain anything any longer. She was able to exist, to survive, during these years, and indeed she gave an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I have ever been told or told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: 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 I the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, 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. (White Album , 12-13) Having begun her personal album of the late sixties with a gathering of puzzling images, she now presents a puzzling one that horrifies us -- the image of a child purposely abandoned to die on the divider of a California highway. The problem for her, for us: "Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew" (13)

Didion's somewhat reduced version of prophetic stature retains many of the Victorian sage's claims and characteristics. Like Carlyle and Thoreau, she writes both as one who is an outsider and as one who has much in common with the audience. Furthermore, she establishes her claims to credibility in part by an astute alternation of satire and sympathy that tends to create the sense of a superior intellect and moral sense judiciously assigning praise and blame. Again, the act of making an unexpected interpretation and an unexpected discovery of relevance establishes ethos. Unlike the earlier sages, Didion achieves these effects in part by making specific, detailed admissions of weakness, and her weakness turns out to be at least a partial strength, or strength within a particular context, because only such a sense of dread would have led to her recognitions.