On Keeping a Notebook
On Keeping a Notebook is an essay written by Joan Didion. She is the voice behind the essay told in the first person. The purpose behind Didion’s essay is the importance of keeping a notebook and recording the feelings you feel at a particular moment and writing down anything when you have the impulse to write. It doesn’t matter if what you write is not what actually happened as long as it connects you to a memory or even none at all; the process of writing down little notes or messages to yourself is a way to express your feelings.
I believe Didion was able to get her point across, she has given examples of some things she has written down in her notebook like the sauerkraut, it evoked memories of drinking Bourbon and going to bed at ten among other memories of her childhood. Her notebook is essentially quite random, there is no structure and not set up to record the facts of her daily life or fossilize the events of the world around her. Some of the notes she has written she doesn’t remember why she wrote them down as she questions them through rhetorical questions. However this makes her more relatable to the everyday person. There doesn’t have to be a deep meaning to something you write. Even if it is an interesting fact or something completely random that you’ll never think about again.
What someone feels and experiences is personal. It may be meaningless if someone comes along and read someone else’s notebook. However, if you read what you’ve written in two to three years it may bring back memories of the mood you were in or what you saw. Near the end of the essay Didion states an important message. As life passes by, we slowly forget who we were in the past. Heartbreaks, friendships, childhood memories to teenage memories slip away from us as we grow older. By writing down our memories, it is a way to reconnect with yourself from the past and recall moments that may have been forgotten. You may see how you’ve grown through the years or questions what
I believe Didion was able to get her point across, she has given examples of some things she has written down in her notebook like the sauerkraut, it evoked memories of drinking Bourbon and going to bed at ten among other memories of her childhood. Her notebook is essentially quite random, there is no structure and not set up to record the facts of her daily life or fossilize the events of the world around her. Some of the notes she has written she doesn’t remember why she wrote them down as she questions them through rhetorical questions. However this makes her more relatable to the everyday person. There doesn’t have to be a deep meaning to something you write. Even if it is an interesting fact or something completely random that you’ll never think about again.
What someone feels and experiences is personal. It may be meaningless if someone comes along and read someone else’s notebook. However, if you read what you’ve written in two to three years it may bring back memories of the mood you were in or what you saw. Near the end of the essay Didion states an important message. As life passes by, we slowly forget who we were in the past. Heartbreaks, friendships, childhood memories to teenage memories slip away from us as we grow older. By writing down our memories, it is a way to reconnect with yourself from the past and recall moments that may have been forgotten. You may see how you’ve grown through the years or questions what