My goodness, I recently immersed myself in Joan Didion’s collection of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. My eye immediately gravitated toward a 1966 essay titled On Keeping a Notebook, subconsciously likely because lately I have been uninspired to keep one myself. Pen to paper, I’d hit a wall, as it’s been hard to dissociate keeping a record of one’s day from what a reporter’s transcript of court proceedings looks like (facts, an exercise in detailed fact-gathering meriting the most overused phrase in the professional world — “detail-oriented” on one’s CV; I want no business in that pomp.)
Didion starts by probing why she writes in a notebook. Sprinkling in examples, a random sauerkrat recipe here, a one-liner heard from a stranger at the Beverly Hills hotel there, she observes the impulsive nature of pen to paper:
“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in a way that any compulsion tries to justify itself,” she writes.
Hinting that keepers of private notebooks are not “delighted with life exactly as it presents itself,” she instead views notebook keepers as “resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children … with some presentiment of loss.”
She then dismisses the idea that keeping a notebook is a way to preserve an accurate factual record, as her approach to daily life “ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent” thanks to the boredom of the day to day.
So, why keep a notebook?
Didion prepares us to take note: “How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.”
And then, what follows in the pages of this short essay is an ode to the deeply personal, meaningful only to the maker, reminder that “we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves” because “your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.”
What is the point?
“Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”
Didion, of course, writes decades before ours, and it is no longer the case, as she had pointed out, that we are taught to see ourselves as the least important person in the room as once was the case (nowadays, in fact, what a different, self-absorbed generation we have).
“Our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.”
Why keep a record of what it was like to be a past version of ourselves? I have “oof yes” annotated in bright blue ink of the following passage, a favorite of mine: “Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; 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. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
As I read this passage, it hit me with a pang that I had forgotten the girl I used to be as a nineteen year-old, how lovingly naive it was for me to sit on the river Seine on a still sunlit summer evening and daydream of finding Love in Paris. How I long to once again know that headstrong girl who was so sure of herself, had already discovered and known herself, but still allowed room for others to recognize her.
The biggest gift Joan Didion thus far gave me through her written word is the comforting thought that “it is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and . . . keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.” A deeply personal endeavor. She writes, “We are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves.”
That Paris summer evening made me feel so in love with the world. And how splendid it would be to have kept a page from that past.