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On Keeping A Notebook
But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.”
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
Keepers of private notebooks are a differ ent breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
I write entirely to find out what’s on my mind, what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I’m seeing and what it means, what I want and what I’m afraid of
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
On Keeping a Notebook By Joan Didion
It all comes back. Even that recipe for sauerkraut: even that brings it back. 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. I made the sauerkraut again last night and it did not make... See more
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
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.
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
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.
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
Crux of why she keeps a notebook.
smart women almost always wear black in Cuba,” a fashion hint without much potential for practical application. And does not the relevance of these notes seem marginal at best?
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
I used to do this a lot as a child. White my own collections of ‘important facts’ so I was not going to lose them
But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talk ing here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consump tion, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées ;... See more
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
Does this change when they are published though? Also the idea of being allowed to become self-centred in your own journal is one that we can still identify with today.