Once_More_to_the_Lake

Kirsten Enriquez Jordan A.P Language and Composition 16 August 2012 On Keeping a Notebook An individual from today’s generation might wonder, “Why do people keep a notebook'” Do they keep a notebook to simply record memories, scribble facts, or write down what they see right before them' I’ve noticed that a notebook can be an important and special tool. It can contain vivid and mundane thoughts meant to be hidden from the public eye and the outside world. For many years, a notebook has been used as a diary, a journal, and even a scrapbook. All in which contain a writer’s emotions, ideas, and thoughts. In the essay called On Keeping a Notebook, Joan Didion, the author, shares a unique reason for keeping a notebook where it becomes more of a knowledge holder of flashbacks, memories, and less of recorded events. The author argues that a notebook is an expression of a person’s feelings at a time rather than a diary which has factual events. “So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking”(1). Didion admits that these factual notes written inside her notebook do not really show a realistic significance. However, these random facts bring about an emotional significance to her at times. “It is a good idea, then to keep in touch and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about”(4). Notebooks will be one’s only prized possessions of today; it will be the only object one will rely on. Unlike the author’s perspective, my point-of-view of keeping a notebook directly supports factual events and memories. Yes I do journal my thoughts. Therefore I use a notebook as a diary. From day to day, I record my memories as lifelong thoughts not as temporary ones. I do agree with some of Joan Didion’s reasons and ideas. “And sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning”(3). There are times when I scribble down thoughts but after a while I begin to forget its importance. With that being said, I would have to think deeply and figure out those broad thoughts in my diary. “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted at birth with some presentiment of loss”(1). As a keeper of a diary, I would always sink my head in a different atmosphere; I tend to feel such loss and loneliness. Just like the author, I was engulfed in my own world. I knew instantly that I, a seventeen year old teenager without a professional degree of literature am a keeper of a private notebook. Back in the old days, I kept myself busy with a little notebook. I would distract myself with my own silly and ridiculous blogs. Within that little mermaid notebook, I led a different world. My imagination took over me; it felt like my pen had its own mind. Nonetheless I never had a Big Five Tablet like Joan Didion. My notebook was no match to hers. “I learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts”(1). We did have that similarity in which we get carried away with our own minds. Through Joan Didion’s On Keeping a Notebook, I now understand that a notebook’s purpose is to remember what used to be a part of society or even still apart of society. It is an act of writing in which writers can express themselves privately. Only writers are able to understand its meaning. They are able to understand their own thoughts with all of their secret codes and indirect expressions. These notebooks are not meant to be for public display but these are originally meant to be shared and only kept for the keepers’ interest and eyes. Keeping a notebook resurface our “what it was to be alive.” Sadly this feeling does not last forever. It slips through our minds like grains of sand through the hourglass. With that said a notebook will be the only visible structure that grasps the days of our lives.