Hermit Diary 29: On Journals

Last week, I was invited to participate in an online reading party centered on journals. The host asked us to choose a favorite journal to read from, and for the few days leading up to the gathering, to make some brief notes about what we had chosen and why. As it turned out, I couldn't participate on Sunday, but I ended up with the following notes (not brief at all) and today it occurred to me to post them here.

 

Friday. A journal to read from. What should it be? I pull out Transtromer’s Baltics, glance at the large spine of Anne Carson’s Nox, think about the Derek Walcott poems I’ve read recently that are diary-like, addressed to the poet himself. Virginia Woolf -- an obvious choice, but no. Then there’s Knausgaard, but what to choose? Or how about his Latin American counterpart Ricardo Piglia, in The Diaries of Emilio Renzi?

I realize with some dismay that one of my favorite journals, Thomas Merton’s The Sign of Jonas, is lent to a friend.

Your request feels pretty personal to me, WM., since practically everything I write is in the form of a journal. I’ve kept diaries since I was very young, and long before I began my blog I kept a paper -- and then digital -- journal, and for a while I even printed out the entries at the end of the year and hand-bound them, interleaved with that year’s correspondence.

Then The Cassandra Pages began, in 2003, and I’ve written it as a personal journal ever since. Then there are journals-within-journals -- a trip to Obama’s inauguration; our first month staying in Montreal; trips to lots of other places; the three-year decline and death of my father-in-law. At the beginning of the pandemic I started what I called A Hermit Diary, on my blog, thinking I would write about life in isolation...an echo of Merton, maybe. In these three months I’ve written 28 entries, each spaced further and further apart. At the beginning there was so much to say, and now, much less, or so it feels to me.

But there’s also another, parallel, private journal on my computer. It begins on April 26, 2004, with a quotation from Merton, a week before we began our move from Vermont to Montreal, and the most recent entry is on January 29 of this year. The wordcount at the bottom says it now contains some 311,414 words. I almost never go back and re-read this journal. (Is it private, even from me?) It’s where I work things out, write down dreams, copy out passages from things I’m reading, letters I’ve written or received. It’s where I complain and worry and try to get my head straight. Once I’ve written through whatever it is, I rarely feel like I want to revisit. And it’s not usually the sort of writing that I would go back and polish and make into a blog entry, or mine for an essay, though sometimes that happens. It’s more like meditation. Or wrestling with the angel who has wounded me.

 

Saturday. There are so many levels of private vs public, raw vs. honed, in my own journal-writing. This makes me mistrust other people’s published journals a little: how reliable, really, is this narrator we want to see as totally so? In fact, I think we’re rarely seeing the raw, uncalculated, truly private version, even in Knausgaard, though he wants us to think that we are. The skilled and practiced journal-writer who is also a writer is always aware of the possibility of a reader. So I keep coming back to Merton, whose journals influenced mine so much.

Merton’s The Sign of Jonas is a book drawn from his journals; he edited and rewrote what he had already written. It came out a number of years after The Seven Storey Mountain, the book which made him famous, and which he came to abhor. His private journals were published long after his death, and I’ve read them all, but even they were carefully edited. Still, what they reveal is that after years as a cloistered monk, living in silence, devoting hours and hours every day to contemplation, he had become keenly aware of all the games he played when presenting himself on paper, all the tricks of the ego, all the ways in which he sought fame or praise, and disguised and disgusted his true self in the process. He had left the academic world of New York in order to seek God and some sort of personal overhaul. He was aiming at authenticity, transparency, honesty, directness, egolessness... and yet he learned how the very act of writing -- which he couldn’t help, couldn’t give up completely -- became a trap for the ego. He talks about it a lot. This was his huge struggle: the need to say what he saw and felt out of the depths of his contemplative experience, to communicate it to others, and to try to make a difference in a broken world, but how writing can become performance that addictively seeks something else entirely: admiration, praise, fame. Just before his accidental death, Merton wrote this about his vocation: "He struggles with the fact of death, trying to seek something deeper than death, and the office of the monk, or the marginal person, the meditative person or the poet, is to go beyond death even in this life, to go beyond the dichotomy of life and death and to be, therefore, a witness to life."

Merton held up a mirror for many of the struggles I was having in writing and in art and in life, and in that mirror I saw myself, my games, my desires more clearly. The mirror shows the whole room: what we need to throw out, and the bits we should keep, and it’s a process that never ends.

 

Sunday. So, here’s the beginning of my private journal, April 2004. It’s Merton, writing on January 8, 1949:

In winter the stripped landscape of Nelson County looks terribly poor. We are the ones who are supposed to be poor; well, I am thinking of the people in a shanty next to the Brandeis plant, on Brook Street, Louisville. We had to wait there while Reverend Father was getting some tractor parts. The woman who lived in this place was standing out in front of it, shivering in some kind of rag, while a suspicious-looking anonymous truck unloaded some bootleg coal in her yard. I wondered if she had been warm yet this winter. And I thought of Gethsemani where we are all steamed up and get our meals, such as they are, when meal time comes around, and where I live locked up in that room with incunabula and manuscripts that you wouldn’t find in the home of a millionaire! Can’t I ever escape from being something comfortable and prosperous and smug? The world is terrible, people are starving to death and freezing and going to hell with despair and here I sit with a silver spoon in my mouth and write books and everybody sends me fan-mail telling me how wonderful I am for giving up so much. I’d like to ask them, what have I given up, anyway, except headaches and responsibilities?

Next time I am sulking because the chant is not so good in the choir I had better remember the people who live up the road. The funny thing is, though, they could all be monks if they wanted to. But they don’t. I suppose, somehow, even to them, the Trappist life looks hard!

 

This follows, written by me sixteen years ago:

It’s a grey, dark day here, and when we woke there was rain pelting against the roof. It’s let up now, and in the bathroom the rainwater is slowing sliding down the incline of the skylight, blurring the silhouettes of the bare-branched treetops. This is the sort of weather that has been depressing me all through the late winter, but today it seems almost indescribably beautiful. It is practically the last day for bare trees; leaf buds are swelling on all the red maples and the honeysuckles are already covered with a cloud of pale green. On the apple tree outside the bedroom window, drops of water hang from the ends of each black twig, daring both gravity and time.

In less than a week, we’re heading to Montreal to live for a month. This will be the longest amount of time I’ve spent in a city in my half-century of life. We’re going as a change from the life we’ve led here, from the house we’ve inhabited for more than 25 years, from the rural countryside, from the particular web of responsibilities and patterns we’ve woven. Besides being urban, Montreal is an international city: proudly and gracefully maintaining its French heritage and a broad ethnic and cultural diversity despite its proximity to the United States and the English-speaking provinces of Canada. It is a mere three-and a half-hours from here, and a world apart.

We’ve been thinking of this month as an experiment. After several years of weekend trips and the occasional week-long stay we want to find out what our commitment to this city really is: how much do we really like living there, and what might that mean for our future? This is what I thought the month was going to be about: practical matters, finding out how we felt, considering some changes and potential investments at this gently teetering point of midlife. Strange, then, that on this wet dark morning I felt, for the first time in several years, a strong call to contemplation. Could it be that part of this journey might be a sort of retreat, bizarre though it seems to retreat to a city? And yet I feel the call so clearly, bidding me to use the coming time and change of place not for distraction and escape, or merely for outward life decisions, but to learn something inner and as yet unrevealed.

For those who believe in God and believe, further, that She has a sense of humor, consider the irony of moving a writer -- especially one steeped in the ultimate contemplativeness of rural Vermont life, complete with clapboard-clad house and vegetable garden, and a pervasive silence punctuated only by bird and cricket -- to the bustle and endless distraction of a city of three million souls for the purpose of contemplation. Funny, even preposterous. But that’s what may be happening. I’ve been on this winding, unpredictable, and largely dusty spiritual path for long enough now to recognize the changes and imperatives when they come -- and for the most part, they have come like this, of the blue.

What immediately fits is the fact that contemplative solitude, for me, is actually easier to find in the city. Having lived my entire life in the fishbowls of small towns, where I cannot step outside my door or buy a bag of carrots without running into someone who knows me, the anonymity of the city is a huge relief. It creates a sense of freedom that is impossible for me here. Perhaps because of living so many years in the country, close to nature, solitude -- for me -- is not dependent on silence, but on being removed from the obligation to talk, interact, and plan. And yet, being a social creature and a moderate extrovert, and knowing that my husband (the opposite) likes to take off for long periods of photographic exploration on his own, I’ve been a little worried about having to deal with too much solitude during an entire month of urban living. “Use it,” I hear now. “It’s a gift.”

Comments

[Natalie]

Beth, this post resonates deeply with me. As I think you know, I've been writing journals/diaries/notebooks all my life since the age of about nine, I have boxes and boxes of them, every shape and size. But I never thought of this activity as 'proper' writing, in the sense that other people might read them. It was just a need to put down what I was feeling and some of the circumstances that affected this. It's only when I look at them now that I think about editing, polishing - in other words, a potential audience looking over my shoulder.

Your journal extracts are definitely writerly and ready for communicating to 'the public'. My problem is that I don't know where the line is, or should be, between private and public. If writing a journal has always been a means of confessing to one's self, spilling all the beans, then where does an audience come in, and should it come in?

[Duchesse]

This resonates with me, for in nature I feel (as a writer known for humour once wrote) "at two with myself". The city can distract with its relentless stimulation, but when I let it, it offers a kernel of solitude all the more profound for its non-ubiquity. I am so glad you are here.

"Private" in terms of a journal—or other writing— is a subjective label that can change over time; the question is whether you are willing to share particular thoughts or experiences.

[Beth]

Natalie, thanks. That's the million-dollar question, isn't it? What to share of those private confessions, and whether it's even right to do so. Of course that's what makes Knausgaard's writings so controversial and destructive, and so compelling at the same time. I've always held myself back when it comes to private stories or thoughts about those close to me, at lest people who are still alive. Being kind and loyal has been the most important consideration, which probably decreases the "interest" of the audience, but so be it.

Duchesse, I'm glad to read your thoughts on solitude and the city, and we'll have to talk more about it. I was sort of surprised to find what I had written about it back then. Now, I chafe sometimes at the busyness of the city and the too-many-ness of the people, and crave being really and truly alone with nature, so I guess the pendulum has swung the other way somewhat. But I also appreciate the way you can slip into a crowd and be anonymous, or walk on the streets without anyone noticing or running into anyone you know -- the solitude in this is just the same as I anticipated long ago.

[am]

Thank you for sharing your journal entries and thoughts about journaling and solitude and contemplation and reminding me how much I benefitted from reading everything that Thomas Merton wrote. I kept regular journals from the age of 18 as a college freshman until the age of 45, only becoming aware of Thomas Merton's writings in my 30s. After my mother (a writer turned artist) died suddenly of a heart attack in 1994, I boxed my journals up and put them in the trash because although they documented my dreams and my joys, they also documented so many years of emotional pain and anger that I didn't want anyone in my family to read if I were to die while they were still alive. Almost immediately, I began buying those illustrated engagement calendars with a space to write in -- at most 1-1/2 x 7 inches. I write just enough to document the events in my day, avoiding writing down anything I wouldn't want anyone else to read. I still buy an engagement calendar for that purpose each year. I keep dream journals. When I began blogging in December 2006, that became another kind of journal. Recently I've felt free to write in one of my laptops those thoughts I don't feel free to write down anywhere else. There are things I need to write for myself, with only God, as it is said, as my witness. My mandalas are another form of journaling. I didn't expect to write so much here today. Thank you for the inspiration.

[Deborah]

Beth, this is wonderful. All of it.

[Martine Pagé]

I loved reading your thoughts on the subject of diaries. It was also really interesting to read about your state of mind just before moving to Montreal. I also used to think cities offered the most privacy but strangely, I find a fair bit of it in the suburbs as well now (the closest I've ever been to living "in the country"). I think for me it's more a matter of living away from where I grew up.

On the subject of diaries, I was captivated by this piece written in The Guardian by Helen Garner, an author I haven't read yet but that I am now looking forward to discovering. I love the way she's completely unsentimental about her old diary writing. I too had that shameful feeling she described of going back to an old diary to find out what I had to say about an important social or political event, only to find out that I never even mentioned it...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/30/my-early-diaries-filled-me-with-so-much-shame-i-burned-them-im-publishing-the-rest

"And of course I soon found myself, day after day, strapped into the straitjacket that is the very nature of a diary: it’s got a voice, it’s entirely composed of voice, but it has no voiceover. It exists in an eternal present."

And I have made Ed promise that if I die suddenly, no one is to read any of my writing and he should destroy everything he finds.

[Beth]

am, thank you for writing. I'm glad to know that Merton made a difference to you too, and I certainly understand the impulse to throw out the most personal writing that could cause hurt to others -- I've done that too. My grandfather kept a jounrnal like the one you describe - just a line or two every day - but it's surprising how interesting it is to read now.

Deborah, thank you reading all of it, and for saying that.

Martine, well, I hope that one of these days some of your personal writing will find its way into a book! You and Ed are mentioned in the entries about Montreal that follow the one I quoted here, because I think we met at a YulBlog meeting during that month. Thanks for the link to the Helen Garner piece - I haven't read it yet but will be sure to talk to you after I have!

[pohanginapete]

Thanks for taking the time to share these excellent thoughts, Beth. Reading about Merton, I couldn't help but remember this quotation from screenwriter Bruce Wagner:
'An old Buddhist text said that the desire for acclaim is so strong that in many ways it’s a more difficult hardship to overcome than poverty or disease. This particular Buddhist text I was reading said that even the most reclusive of cave monks will have the desire to be known the world over as the most reclusive of cave monks.' (https://www.openlettersmonthlyarchive.com/hammer-and-thump/interview-maps-to-the-stars-screenwriter-bruce-wagner)

I came across the quotation in Elisa Gabbert's Paris Review article 'On Writerly Jealousy' — a good read in its own right (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/05/on-writerly-jealousy/)

Much more I could say, but I have daily journal writing to complete ;-)