Isazappy
For many of us these days, the careful keeping of a journal seems far too disciplined and ever-so lonely compared to the easy online alternative of Facebook “profiles.” Why copy your favorite lyrics onto the pages of a Moleskin when you can paste those lyrics all over the internet? Why cultivate your mind in the private, modest means of a few blank, silent pages when you can share your thoughts with the world on a blog? Most people suggest journal writing is a means of catharsis or a simple working-through of personal thoughts. It’s a place where we can sit back and not care what our words “sound like.”
But was journal writing ever so pure? What is the true motivation behind keeping a journal? Are we not always conscious of how we are portraying ourselves? Especially where it concerns writers and artists, it seems impossible to assume that journals are not a place for exhibitionism. When we pick up the journal of a famous writer, we must do it with consideration for her knowledge that one day she would have an audience.
Virginia Woolf preempted one of her journals with the following musing: “What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight, or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.” While she desires to work through her thoughts with a “stream-of-consciousness-approach,” she is also interested in shaping her diary, and in suiting it to herself. Her journal itself takes on a character.
A senior at Brown who wished to remain anonymous commented on these same issues of audience. “I don’t think of my journal as representing me in the way my Facebook page has to represent me. I mean, there is also the visual element to online journalism. But my journal is also like a deep cultivation of myself. And I totally think about who might read it one day.” A Brown sophomore, on the other hand, who also wished to remain anonymous, admitted that she had written things she would rather “destroy” and that her journal writing was “confessional.” But, if we are sure nobody will read our work, why are we often so quick to destroy it? Why do we throw away things we have written that were meant to be a simple experiment in the first place? We take ourselves seriously as writers, and we take care to work through our identity, whether it be on our profiles on Facebook, or behind the scenes.
Take Susan Sontag’s journals, for example. Specifically, “Reborn,” the earliest of her collection of journals, accounting for her teenage years through her young adult life in New York. The collection of entries seems to consist, at first, of entirely personal musings, typical preoccupations of an overzealous young woman: the most recent sightings of her female lover, critiques of Anais Nin, the appropriate level of involvement in college life (“…every day I shall set aside for writing and study outside in the sun, and whatever time in the evenings I can manage—I shall be quiet, courteous, and disinvolved!”—page 17). There seems to be a certain solace in a genre that does not automatically formalize writing. Sontag continually “instructs” herself in all sections of this journal, “not to try to be amusing,” “[to] tell yourself you are not good.” There is an informality and a bareness to this language that speaks to the liberating quality we most commonly associate with journal writing. But still, in these self-instructive remarks there is a mission toward understanding and improving oneself. There is an apparent desire to build oneself up and to construct oneself. It’s not unlike reading another student’s blog: choppy, sex-filled, presumptuous, and daring, but still overtly, if not overly, aware.
The journal has always been an offering of a self-portrait, carefully crafted or brashly stated. It doesn’t have the aid of photographic memoirs or the burden of a minute-to-minute update on our “likes” and “dislikes.” But it is often a carefully crafted expression and a meditation on the persona.
