Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactlywhat was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened?Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneselfon all those scores.
Saved by Alex Dobrenko and
Joan Didion (from “On Keeping a Notebook”):
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. Keeping a notebook keeps alive some illusion of who we used to be, allowing us to maintain continuity with a self we’ve already outgro
... See moreI 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 moreDuring those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a
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