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
I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line “That’s my old football number” touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probabl
... 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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