Marrying Absurd...ARE THEY CRAZY?!

When one person, or a group of people, does something for a certain amount of time repetitively, that is what tradition means to me. It can be established at any point in life and can end whenever it does. Tradition does not have to be a form of religious belief but could be any type of action someone does over a period of years. It can also be handed down from generation to generation, no matter what that certain tradition is. For example, a tradition that my family practices is: we all have to sit as a family every night for dinner if we don’t eat out. It has been going on for as long as I remember. People have different ways to define tradition, and Joan Didion, author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, defines her definition of tradition in her essay, “Marrying Absurd.”

In this essay, Didion concentrates on the tradition of marriage and its failure to match the exalted expectations we have of it as something sacred or something with a significance, in contrast to a quick marriage out in Las Vegas. Didion quoted, “To be married in Las Vegas, Clark County Nevada, a bride must swear that she is eighteen or has parental permission and a bridegroom that he is twenty-one or has parental permission. Someone must put up five dollars…nothing else is required.” What Didion says about the tradition of a Las Vegas marriage is merely just a marriage on the hot table, happening during the hottest point of a relationship, not a special relationship, but just a relationship. Didion explains, “One night at about eleven o’clock in Las Vegas, I watched a bride in an orange minidress and masses of flame-colored hair stumble from a Strip chapel on the arm of her bridegroom, who looked the part of the expendable nephew in movies like Miami Syndicate.” Marriage is supposed to be special, but in their case, it is just a quick move which really has no significance in life at all. It isn’t a marriage to be cherished for the rest of their lives, but a marriage of absurdity.

So as one can see, traditions fall between a person’s own beliefs and societal beliefs such as marriage that has been going on for years on end. Views on different traditions can be skewed, but other views turn out to be perfectly clear, just as Didion had proved in her essay, “Marrying Absurd.”