vol 32: die Schreiberin… schreibt :) ✍🏻
on diary-keeping
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” -Aristotle “You’ve got to know yourself so you can at last be yourself.” -D.H. Lawrence
Where did we leave off?
There was Baden bei Wien, and Croatia, and Toronto, and Winnipeg, and Steinbach… and now I’m settled back into life in Montreal.
I know I [might be] a writer because it’s something I can do all day and I still want to do more of it at the end of the day. It’s even something that shows up in my singing… I posted on Instagram today a video of myself performing Felix Mendelssohn’s Die liebende Schreibt. I worked on it a little this summer with Helmut Deutsch, a very esteemed accompanist (to stars like Jonas Kaufmann, for one). After I sang it, he said, “This piece is very close to you, no? Do you write letters?”
Die Liebende schreibt / The beloved writes - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans. Richard Stokes … Entfernt von dir, entfremdet von den Meinen, Far from you, estranged from my family, Da führ ich die Gedanken in die Runde, I let my thoughts rove constantly, Und immer treffen sie auf jene Stunde, And always they fix on that hour, Die einzige; da fang ich an zu weinen. That precious hour; and I begin to weep. Die Träne trocknet wieder unversehens: Suddenly my tears grow dry again: Er liebt ja, denk ich, her in diese Stille, His love, I think, he sends into this silence, O solltest du nicht in die Ferne reichen? And should you not reach out into the distance?
My lifelong proclivity for diary-keeping is something that’s also made me relate to Anne Frank, who I’ve played in a couple of operatic and choral adaptations now. My parents can attest to the boxes of my journals I’ve kept since the age of … eight, maybe? I have ones where I was even younger with a note from Santa Claus glued in. Some of them are sad to look back on, like my expressions of sadness when I was thirteen and still missing my grandmother who’d passed away a few years before. When I was in high school, I loved indulging in rereading my old journals. (Reminds me of the Oscar Wilde quote, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”) Now I actually can’t bear reading them… And I also have my journalling limits (three months of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way morning pages during the pandemic turned me into a ruminating mess).
Yet, I still like to keep journals; when I’ve had an interesting dream, when there’s something I need to get off my chest, something extraordinary that I’ve witnessed (like this year’s full solar eclipse!), or something I just feel like indulging in privately.
I love Joan Didion’s summation of why she believes one should keep a notebook: in order to not lose track of oneself. Because while we all change, are we ever so different from those people we started out as in childhood/adolescence? It’s interesting being an aunt now, and seeing my three (almost four) year-old niece develop a personality. How indicative is her personality of how she will be one day? Or do we just mythologize our past selves to reinforce our current personas?
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
[…]
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.”
-Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook” (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)
Having done some yoga training, I can also attest that Svadhyaya or self-study is an important tenant of yoga in attaining awareness/consciousness.
I relate to the formless potential Virginia Woolf observed in her diaries:
“I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year’s diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles.”
(January 20th, 1919, when Woolf was 37.)
&
“But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. …
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, 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 them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.” (April 20th, 1919)
I took an American literature class during my undergrad where at one point, we looked at Robert Frost, who my prof thought was one of the most misunderstood poets. He believed Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken” to be not about the importance of taking a less-trodden path, but the way we tell stories later in life about the different choices we’ve made - mythologizing these choices and rendering them important/grandiose. At the end of life, what are we except our stories [that can be nicely told in our journals {and which I loved to reread as an egocentric teen}]?
Perhaps that’s why I like my journals to have a meandering sort of formlessness. My day-to-day is not so important that it merits scrupulous detailing. I’m more interested in the fragmentary bits of feeling that make up my humanness.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost, The Road Not TakenPlease indulge me: do you keep journals? Have you? Why do you think you did it? And better yet, do you re-read them? :)
PS: In a funny moment of synchronicity (for which Julia Cameron advises one to always be on the lookout), as I’ve been adding to this post CBC radio is advertising that this weekend’s Sunday Magazine will have a segment on notebook-writing. Maybe you’ll be listening while you read this. ;)
I don't regularly keep a journal, but find myself writing sporadically. And when I find pieces from years ago, I'm surprised that my essence is there. The things that mattered then still matter to me now, and my reflections are similar. I enjoyed the gentleness of this piece. Thank you.