On the sermon – Michiko Kakutani in NYT:

‘“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion wrote in “The White Album.” “The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.” People look “for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” Didion’s utterly distinctive writing style — distinguished by its spareness, its surgical precision, its almost staccato yet incantatory rhythms — was also a tool for containing her often harrowing subject matter, be it her own experiences of loss and grief, reportorial assignments involving murder or war, or the melodramatic situations that the heroines in her novels so often faced. She had an eye for the prophetic detail and telling gesture, an ear for the line of overheard dialogue that might reveal all.’

Read the article here.

This is a great Didion quote.

Yes, we look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social lesson in the murder of five in the pandemic.

The news is just an excuse to deliver yet another sermon. History an opportunity to blabber about moral lessons.
Man feels obliged to change the world (thanks Christianity, thanks philosophy) but he intuitively acknowledges that this task is mostly beyond his powers, hence the blabbering,

This is not to say that we should mindlessly accept the status quo, just an encouragement to realize that the consequences of our deeds, especially of many of our so-called good deeds, are unknown to us.