Ongoingness

I'm still trying to figure out how successful this book was ... it was a thoughtful, small, interesting read ... and I am equal parts tempted to say that is was way too short and to claim that there is no other way this book could've worked.

I really wouldn't have expected to be able to read an entire book about someone's 20 year-long journal in less than a 2 hour plane ride, but the format chosen does lend itself to either speeding through, or taking each entry as a kind of poem and using the blank space that usually occupies at least half the page to contemplate.

One thing the author focused on (or at least the thing that jumped out to me the most) was her impetus for writing her journal every day was not so much a contrived literary exercise, but more of an internal compulsion - something she had to do and not just to catalogue what had happened each day, but to use the negative space to paint her picture; to let the parts she didn't record tell the story just as much as those she did.

I feel like this was a big clue to understanding both her frame of mind at the time, and all the half-filled pages on this book. Never does she actually include an entry from the journal itself, but she tells us about the types of things she had been writing and why. Then she lets the suggestion of the white space hang there and we have to decide if something major has been redacted therein... or if everything else can simply be taken as granted.

I'd have given this book more stars when I was younger, but I would also have felt more intimidated by it.

I say this as if I could remember my younger self well enough to make such pronouncements. I believe I do, while at the same time knowing that I have forgotten a great deal. But I have schematized my past, like a scientist formulating a physical law summarizing an infinite number of situations as an equation. My schema allows me to proceed confidently with a stable identity which the Buddhists have told us is an illusion.

A diary is that sort of organization of time. Understanding that it leaves out almost everything -- because it must -- dissolves the comforting stability of linearity composed of the quanta of events. In its place we find ongoingness.

For Sarah Manguso, it was the birth of her son that so overwhelmed her imagined ability to control time. There's nothing like lack of sleep and the demanding needs of an infant to break down the order of things. Monks traditionally had to fast and take vows of poverty to achieve such insights because, since they were all male, this other avenue of spiritual discovery was closed to them.

I never kept a diary. Not because I didn't want to remember everything, but because I felt it would become evidence against me. Being freed of linear time takes me beyond the reach of my accusers and allows me to write reviews of books and to apportion stars to them without fear. Sure I could be totally wrong and misunderstand the authors' genius, but now I don't mind that fate so much. That's why I'm not intimidated the way I remember I once was.