Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
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Seeenough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning whenthe world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only goingthrough the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write —on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there itwill all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passageback to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevatorsand at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows hishat check to another and says, “That’s my old football number”); impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy(“Mr. Acapulco”) Stauffer; careful aperçus1 about tennis bums andfailed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taughtme a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. ScottFitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) byasking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting roomon the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it wassnowing outside.
Saved by Alex Dobrenko and
How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a note book. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going throu
... See moreJoan Didion reflects on the personal and introspective nature of keeping a notebook, delving into memory, self-reflection, and the significance of past experiences.
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