Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion

Since the note is in my notebook, it presumably has some meaning to me.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly com pulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only acciden tally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

It is in the present moment that we begin to know ourselves. Joan Didion, a famous proponent of writing things down, began doing so at age five. She believed that notebooks were one of the best antidotes for a distracted world: “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget w

... See more

And so we do. 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 grace... See more

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 more

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 through 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 it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage... See more