Buy me chowder.
Hello from Dublin. The longer I keep a journal, the less I want to write about myself, and the more I want to write about strangers. Not because I think I’m uninteresting, but because it’s interesting for a person to find other people interesting, and the worst thing you can be in your own journal is boring. It was keeping a journal that revealed this unintuitive fact; that it’s the things that seem totally unremarkable at the moment that are the gems. The inner turmoils, the baroque meditations… These read like filler between descriptions of other people’s outfits, their eccentricities, and descriptions of furniture. The only parts I like reading about myself are when I’m doing things a stranger might be seen doing. I’m sitting in a restaurant. I’m eating chowder. I’m restlessly drumming my fingers on a marble table.
The journal I have now, a red Leuchtturm, is filling up nicely. There’s a smug satisfaction in watching the ribbon bookmark migrate further rightward by the day, the written record of my life getting fatter. It feels like I’m accomplishing something, but I’m not, really. Keeping a journal isn’t about accomplishment. My journal is my daily companion. I can’t imagine life without it. There’s nothing important in it.
I saw a man on the train to Dalkey this morning. He was watching videos on his phone at full volume, laughing and literally slapping his knee. I hated him. I glared in his direction. We got off at the same stop. Minutes later, I saw him on the sidewalk beneath a blanket, the anguish of a Catholic martyr plastered on his face, eyes cast dramatically heavenward, asking for euros. I love him now.
My argument for keeping a journal is primarily a sensualist one. Keeping a journal provides pleasure, like looking at art, or kissing, or pressing your forehead against a cold window on a train on a drizzly day. It’s indulgent. My hand moves to write in my notebook with the same thoughtless greed that moves it toward chocolate or to another sip of wine. Luxury. Will it make me a better writer, improve my mental health, reveal otherwise obscured truths by plumbing the depths of my subconscious? I don’t care. “Your notebook will never help me, nor mine you,” wrote Joan Didion. A journal isn’t about self-improvement. Strange as it sounds, my journal is a means of moving beyond myself.