Wednesday, November 6, 2019 // The Statement
4B
5B
Wednesday, November 6, 2019 // The Statement
I
wrote so I could say I was truly paying
attention,”
writer
and
poet
Sarah
Manguso explained. These verbs should
be past tense, but since they’re all present tense,
I’ll let you decide if
you want to change
them all. As long as
they’re
consistent
in her 2015 book
“Ongoingness:
The
End
of
a
Diary.”
“Experience in
itself
wasn’t
enough.
The
diary was my
defense against
waking up at the
end
of
my
life
and realizing I’d
missed it.”
Like Manguso,
I want to feel as if
I’m paying careful
attention to my
life, and keeping
a diary seems like
a good way to do
it. “There should
be
extra
days,
buffer
days,
between the real
days,” Manguso
wrote. I want
this, too: a break
from
time,
a
little
pocket
of
nothing
in
which to figure
out the fullness
of
the
days.
Writing in my
journal
might
be the closest
I can get to
a break. But
diary-keeping
serves
other
purposes, too,
and I’m trying to figure out what those are.
“Introspection is not as reliable as observation,”
writes essayist Louis Menard in his article “Woke
Up This Morning,” which appeared in The New
Yorker in 2007. In the piece, Menard tried to
puzzle out diaries — why we keep them, and why
we like to read other people’s. Menard argued
that diaries aren’t a particularly
trustworthy record of the diarist’s
inner life. Instead, he supposed
that diary-keeping might reflect
various psychological needs or
imbalances, and are thus tainted
by the purpose the journal serves
for the writer.
Menard drew on a few Freudian
ideas, including the ego theory
(“It obliges you to believe that
the stuff that happened to you
is worth writing down because
it happened to you”) and the id
theory, which proposes diaries
as a tool for recording desires
and
failures
that
cannot
be
publicly expressed. Next comes
the superego theory: “When we
describe the day’s events and our
management of them, we have
in mind a wise and benevolent
reader who will someday see
that we played, on the whole, and
despite the best efforts of selfish
and unworthy colleagues and
relations, a creditable game with
the hand we were dealt.”
I’ve kept a diary since I was
seven or eight years old, and I
think all of these theories
might be true, to some
extent. I write to
figure out how I
feel, and in doing
so,
I
feel
I’m
justifying things
— to myself, a future
version of me who’ll
read
the
diary,
or
to
someone who might stumble
on it years after my death. But
how accurate is the rendering of
myself that I’ll reread, 30 years down
the line? I think it’s possible Menard is right that
the picture is not very accurate at all. Sometimes,
I’ll write something down in my diary about the
way I’m feeling or an interaction with a friend,
and know that I haven’t got it quite right.
According to Menard, diaries are inaccurate,
possibly ego-driven (or id-driven, or superego-
driven) records. What, then, is the point in
keeping them? What’s the point of reading
them? Even if a diary is shaped by unconscious
desires, even if it’s a blatant attempt to create
the sort of person you want to be, I
think it still reflects something
important about who you were
at the moment of writing:
insecure, sad, confused,
thrilled. Rereading a diary
might not help current-me
remember what past-me was
like, but it’ll remind me of who
I wanted to be. Diary entries are
always a reflection of something
true, even if that truth isn’t always
communicated obtusely.
I’m thinking of a song by Evan
Dando called “Hard Drive”: “This is
the bed I’m sleeping in / This is the
shirt I’m buttoning / This is the pace
I’m moving at / This is the tune I’m
humming now / This is the road I’m
walkin’ down,” he sings, cataloguing his
life the way one might in a diary. “Have
you ever felt yourself in motion?” he continues.
“It reminds me of the way writing in a diary or
rereading one can sometimes feel: a fall back to
yourself, a reminder of the currents of change
beneath everything.”
S
ome years I wrote in my diary every single
day, but there have also been periods
when weeks or months passed with only
a few lines. I recently finished the diary I’d been
using since my sophomore year of high school.
The first entry is dated Monday, Feb. 9, 2015,
10:10 p.m.
“Okay day,” I wrote. “Got 97 on Art History
test (Mannerism, High Renaissance) but math
quiz was so hard!!! Get to finish it in the morning
because the other class took it in a double and we
only had a single. Alex still hasn’t asked me to
junior prom. Trip to Gettysburg this week!”
In an article about nostalgia, journalist Haley
Nahman wrote about the way her memory shifts
to fit changing stories about her life.
“I compartmentalize it and then piece it back
together in whatever arrangement suits my
chosen narrative (I was happy. I was inspired. I
was broken),” she wrote.
I do this, too, but when I reread my diaries,
it feels both comforting and unsettling to be
presented with a rough approximation of how it
was to be 17 (or 10, or 13, or 20). But the rush
of memory and nostalgia that accompanies
rereading my diaries always feel buffered by the
things I didn’t yet know when I was writing. I
didn’t know on February 9, 2015, that I’d go to
junior prom with Will, not Alex, and that he’d
kiss me on the forehead at the after-party, and
we’d watch the Mr. Bean movie, and I’d want
to go home. Or that I’d never be very good at
math, but it wouldn’t really matter. How
can I remember anything accurately,
when every memory is tainted or
softened by what came after?
There’s
a
concept
in
psychology called peak-end
theory,
which
proposes
that the way we remember
something — a relationship,
a road trip, a job — is based on
the most intense emotional
aspect of that thing and the
way it ended, rather than an
average of every emotional high
and low. I’m especially interested in
the idea that endings could unravel or revive a
memory. A lovely vacation could end in a bitter
argument, and the fight is what you’d remember.
An awful day could close with an unexpected
moment of joy, and all the pain would fall to the
wayside. A fulfilling friendship might fall apart
in a painful way, and the hurt is what would
stand out.
It seems unfair that the way something
ends could ruin the rest of it, but this is the
double-edged sword of memory, and of endings.
Heartbreak, grief, disappointment, anger: They
don’t seem so awful if everything turned out ok
in the end. Happiness is likewise changed by
whatever happened next — a death, a breakup, an
argument taken too far. Montages of picnics and
parties and inside jokes can spoil so easily. This
is partly why it feels important to me to write
everything
down,
even the feelings
I
know
are
temporary.
Otherwise,
I
run
the
risk
of
letting
everything
be
defined
by
endings,
which
seems like a uniquely
unsatisfying way to live.
Even if the things I’m
writing aren’t the truest
truth — even if they are
shaped by how I want to
feel or think I should feel
— the approximations I come up with are better
than the alternative, which is my own malleable
memory.
S
peaking of endings: I’ve been thinking
about them a lot lately. I’m a senior, and
the knowledge that this is my last year
in Ann Arbor seems to crop up at inconvenient
times. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was a
freshman. College is funny that way: Graduation
doesn’t seem far off, but neither does the time
when leaving felt impossibly remote.
The weirdest part of being a senior for me is
that this is when college life feels the fullest and
settled. My bedroom feels like a real room, not a
temporary landing pad. The drawing of a hand
that my friend Summer made; the Andy Warhol
poster I bought in Chicago over fall break; the
ticket stub from a concert I covered for The
Daily; the cartoon I cut out from The New Yorker
last week. (Roald Dahl sits under a tree, waiting
for a book idea. A giant technicolor peach falls
on his head.)
And my friends: I’ve known them for long
enough that we have a trove of stories to tell and
retell, a whole world that we’ve created over the
past three years. We say, remember the time we
ducked out of a party to get burritos? Remember
when I spilled red wine all over a boy’s white
shirt at that frat party and he came stomping
into the girl’s bathroom to find me? Remember
when we thought we heard a burglar and ran
outside and accidently locked ourselves out of
the house? Remember the day at the river, that
football game in the snow? The sunburn?
Remembering college is as satisfying right
now as it’ll ever be, because nothing hurts to
recall. It’s all still here. But in six months it’ll
be over, and I’m trying to figure out how to not
keep thinking about the end. I think part of the
solution might have to do with writing things
down — not just for future-me, who will want
to crawl back into this life, but also for now-me.
Documenting the way things are right now is
a way to indulge in the present, to feel as if it’s
ok to stay deep inside my life, even if the pain of
leaving might change the way I remember this
time.
In a series of excerpts from the late journalist
Mavis Gallant’s diaries, which were published
in The New Yorker in 2012, one entry from 1959
stood out to me.
“Must reality become unreal?” she wrote.
“Record, then, that we took the train and walked
in the royal park at Marly, and lay in the uncut
grass under a sky as warm as wool and blue
as itself. The chestnut trees looked as though
nothing could oblige them ever to shed their
leaves; and when the wind bent the grass around
the barren flat, submissively, the grass went all
one color, silvery, like the underside of leaves, as
if it might rain.”
I admire how swiftly Gallant moved from
existential angst to earnest, keenly observant
musings on the present. This, I think, is the
work of all diarists — to recognize that the task
of documentation is an impossible one, and to
proceed with it anyway.
BY MIRIAM FRANCISCO, SENIOR COPY EDITOR
What does reality mean to a diarist?
“
PHOTOS BY DANYEL THARAKAN