New Book

"All serious daring starts within."

- Eudora Welty

This was the first line I read in a book I found today at the bookstore.  I bought it, took it to Caribou, and read the first half of it this evening.  This book was a perfect find, and brought back to me an earlier self, lately hidden.   It was about journaling.  It was also about what you do when you have a collection of diaries and know that they are an accumulation of life but have no direction.  This book was an answer to many internal questions.  It answered the question I finally asked myself.

'Why did you stop?' 



I did stop writing in journals for a while.  Introspection went elsewhere, but I missed the journal.  Writing about my own life got crowded with 'should' and 'should not' and I avoided something organic and real.  I discovered that believing what I was reading tonight also brought back the respect for the earlier self, which has lately gone unnoticed.  I wrote all over this book, and the ideas and sentences were leaping off of the page at me the entire time. 

Here are some of the things I loved best.  In the spirit of staying present, I'm only adding them here.  The ruminating, the 'thickening of fine details', will come at a later time.


From Virginia Woolf...
"What sort of diary should I like mine to be?  Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.  I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking.  I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself...into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life."


"I keep one such journal next to my bedside : Etty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life.  Two miles from where Anne Frank was hiding in Amsterdam, twenty-seven-year-old Etty Hillesum also kept a diary.  Between 1941 and 1943, its pages chronicled her deepest desires - a wish to write, to be loved, to know God.  At its heart, it celebrates a timeless search for meaning while carefully recording all that would extinguish it.  Hillesum perished at Auschwitz when she was twenty-nine.  But not before leaving behind one of the twentieth century's great diaries, an original voice whose courage burns steady as a wick.  'All that words should do,' she wrote for a private audience of one, 'is to lend silence form.'"


"It is very strange, but the mere act of writing anything is a help.  it seems to speed one on one's way." - Katherine Mansfield


"As Katherine Mansfield noted, her journal became a way 'to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and o become a conscious, direct human being.' Journal writing is, foremost, a way order and reframe perspective."


"Here are a few voices on what a diary truly is...
'A blank-faced confidante.'
'Shelter.'
'My memory's memory.'
'A hidden savings account.'
'Where all my creative work first hides.'
'Life's rough draft I can edit.'
'A way to travel while sitting perfectly still.'
And finally, Gertrude Stein, ever to the point: 'A diary means yes indeed.'"

On censoring the Censor...
"The Censor.  It's that tight muscle of perfectionism.  That dark, icy whisper.  That confidence thief.  I have never met a person who didn't believe theirs was the most demanding on the planet."   

"Our work is nothing but a long journey to recover, through the detours of art, the two or three simple and great images which first gained access to our heart." - Albert Camus

"I began idly flipping through the old volumes.  To reread a journal, I suspected, was the set yourself up for double misery:  finding no wisdom and seeing how awful the original writing was.  Yet I felt a quiet shiver of surprise.  They weren't so bad.  I felt a strange fondness for this someone else in the journal.  (I was someone else then.)  Life, as Annie Dillard said of her own journals, had accumulated, not merely passed."   




The verdict here: I am going to give more respect to the old shining things and not write myself off as someone who is too much like Anne Shirley for my own good.  Anything pre-25 in life has been off limits in my mind, and that is the bulk of my life so far.  There are reasons for it.  And I think people want to live forward, but you don't want to forget things you've accumulated in life, if they can help. 

Advice from Rilke, this 'live the questions' idea, has felt pertinent, necessary, and unavoidable.  And yet, a younger more enthusiastic Jessica could probably say something fairly inspiring to the current self.   I'm going to investigate, once again 'salute thyself; see what thy soul doth wear', and see where the writing brings me.