I'm still reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in my few sane-ish moments. One essay is entitled "On Keeping a Notebook," and Didion writes:
"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."
Do you agree with that? I'm not sure I do . . . As an intermittent keeper of a private notebook, while I sometimes write out of anxiety, loneliness, and fear, I often write in my notebooks to remember happy things -- or simply to remember things, generally. Later in the essay she writes "keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about," and that I agree with. Keeping a notebook is, first, a way of keeping in touch with one's self, and second, a way of processing things that will put you in better touch with others.
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