2/4/2026

 Wednesday, February 4, 2026

D+89

1849  University of Wisconsin began in 1 room with 20 students

1938 "Our Town," the play by Thornton Wilder opened on Broadway, NYC

1938 Hitler seized control of the German army and put Nazis in key posts

1990 10 Israeli tourists were murdered near Cairo

2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room

2020 Rush Limbaugh was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Donald Trump during the State Of The Union Address

2025  Donald Trump announced a plan where the U.S. would seek "long-term ownership" of Gaza, and that the U.S. military would be in charge of Gaza's redevelopment into “The Riviera of the Middle East” for "the world's people." saying Palestinians will have no choice but to leave the territory.

2025  The U.S. State Department ordered the closure of all overseas missions of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 

2025  The Senate confirmed Pam Bondi as Attorney General, 

In bed at 9:40, up at 6:40.

Morning meds at 4 p.m.        

  

Why do people keep a journal, chronicle, diary, or daily notebook?

When I wrote my memoir, about 20 years ago, I started it with an epigraph by Sir Leslie Stephen from his autobiography.

Nobody ever wrote a dull autobiography.  If one may make such a bull, the very dullness would be interesting.  The autobiography has ex officio two qualifications of supreme importance in all literary work.  He is writing about a topic about which he is keenly interested, and about a topic upon which he is the highest living authority. . . Autobiography for these reasons is so generally interesting that I have frequently thought with the admirable Benvenuto Cellini that it should be considered as a duty by all eminent men; and, indeed, by men not eminent.  As every sensible man is exhorted to make his will, he should also be bound to leave to his descendants some account of his experience of life. 

 As a member of the enormous class of "men not eminent," I nonetheless followed Sir Leslie's advice to leave to my children some account of my experience of life in the form of almost 300 typed pages of memoir of my years of life up to the time they were born.  I don't know whether either of the children considered my effort worthwhile, but I myself have, more times than I could count, referred to and quoted from it in my other magnum opus, the journal I have kept for the last 3 and 1/2 years.   It now comprises probably more than 2,000 typed pages.  I don't know whether to call the work a journal, a chronicle, a diary, or just a notebook, but I'm glad I kept it up over almost 1,300 days, just as I am glad that I wrote the memoir.  In it, I have often written about my questioning of why I keep writing it. I wish I could easily retrieve those entries, but one downside of the now-extensive work is that it's not indexed or easily searchable.  In any event, I was reminded of it this morning reading the following article by Daniel Poppick in the New York Times Magazine.

        Don’t Keep a Diary. Embrace the Fragments of Real Life.   A diary can construct a false narrative, but the abstract  snippets of a notebook let reality come into focus.

“Hello, I’ve never met you before, so it really is a pleasure. I hope the feeling is mutual.” So begins my grandmother’s diary from 1939. She was 18, living at home with her parents in Brooklyn. “As you will find out henceforth, I am a ‘different’ person.”

I’ve never consistently kept a diary. On the rare occasions I’ve tried, the voice that emerges is that of a “different” person — a clunky, wooden avatar, by turns stifled and overly performative. My grandmother, who as far as I know never expressed literary ambitions, didn’t have this problem. Her diary crackles with vivid turns of phrase and snapshots of her life: riding to a dance near Eastern Parkway on a bus “packed to the margin”; watching her friends make out at a party (“They necked all evening, and I mean necked … I saw some champion mauling”); eerily prescient rumblings of the atrocities playing out overseas as Hitler advanced farther into Europe (on Sept. 9, 1939, “John Gunther reported that 1,000,000 cats + dogs have been killed by Britishes for fear they would be unable to defend themselves in case of an air raid”).

My own rare diary entries from the summer of 2008, when I was 23, make me sound like an overwhelmed executive assistant to my own memory. “S. and G. had their first child yesterday, the first of my friends to do such a thing,” I wrote in one. “Well. Now seems the time to put that to the side. There will be plenty of time for considering it later.” Elsewhere I favored embarrassing hyperbole, as when I claimed that same week that the rapper Nas “saved my life.”

Over time, a shift in approach loosened me up: Rather than keeping a diary, I started keeping notebooks. Where a diary constructs narrative, character and voice, a notebook is inherently fragmented, allowing for unexpected glimmers of serendipitous juxtaposition and lyric voltage. It is at once a less restricted form and one that renders perception more precisely. It has always been more generative for my writing, more comfortable, more surprising. Joan Didion made a similar distinction in her 1968 essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” For her, the point “has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.”

One of my notebook entries from 2018 reads, “What a random emperor you are!” The following month, “Pants: a tool like any other.” Accuracy or basic coherence is less the point than recording the music hidden behind the white noise of routine. In 2016, preparing for an impending job interview, I wrote, “Will there be opportunity for my career to develop here?” On the following page, “A poem refuses death.” (I did not get the job.) A friend’s turn of phrase, an overheard conversation on the subway, a weirdly resonant ad — all of it has a place in a notebook. “Dog afraid of noises? THUNDER SHIRT,” I wrote in 2011, recording the text of a billboard, followed by, “I offer you here a break from my voice.”

That’s what a notebook is: a break from your own voice. If diaries are where we willfully perform ourselves, notebooks project a slanted light onto our days, revealing a shadowed grain and texture that we otherwise might not notice. It is a place where we can drop the act that we put on — even in the privacy of our own thoughts, we are often playing a part. “Our notebooks give us away,” Didion writes, “for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’”

On this score, I only partially agree. Our notebooks do give us away, but they also reveal something about where we stand in relation to our time and place. Take Sei Shonagon’s “The Pillow Book,” written just before the year 1,000 — the notebook that she kept while serving as a lady-in-waiting in the cloistered luxury of Japan’s imperial court. “The Pillow Book” is perhaps best known for its detailed, gossipy, beautiful lists: “Things now useless that recall a glorious past,” “Things that quicken the heart,” “People who feel smug,” “Spectacles” and “Wind instruments,” to name just a few. It does not reflect the widespread poverty of its time, nor the fact that Shonagon was eventually forced to leave the court and most likely lived in poverty herself — but we can’t know for sure, because there is no definitive historical record. “The Pillow Book,” like all autobiographical writing, is limited in its view.

The same is true of my own notebooks. In 2020, I wrote, “Come for the death-knell, stay for the preserves.” I don’t remember writing this, and while it might sound like nonsense, the joke about death and preservation reflects a feeling that I do remember having early in the pandemic about the very real possibility of societal collapse. In these abstract fragments, real life comes into focus.

It is an impulse that many of us share: to put something of our experience into language before time and mortality render us mute. By the end of the summer of 1939, my grandmother’s diary entries became sparse, containing almost no detail about her days. An entire entry from the end of the summer reads, “Today England declared war on Germany /// Germany invaded Poland, therefore the above.”

Can the sundry details, cherry-picked quotations, dream logic and yawning gaps in our diaries and notebooks speak to the violence of our own moment in history? To answer, we have to record not only who we are but also what we observe, and read between the lines.

And this essay by Maria Popova about Joan Didion's essay On Keeping a Notebook: 

As a lover — and keeper — of diaries and notebooks, I find myself returning again and again to the question of what compels us — what propels us — to record our impressions of the present moment in all their fragile subjectivity. From Joan Didion’s 1968 anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem (public library) — the same volume that gave us her timeless meditation on self-respect — comes a wonderful essay titled “On Keeping a Notebook,” in which Didion considers precisely that. Though the essay was originally written nearly half a century ago, the insights at its heart apply to much of our modern record-keeping, from blogging to Twitter to Instagram.

After citing a seemingly arbitrary vignette she had found scribbled in an old notebook, Didion asks:

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.  […]

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. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

To that end, she confesses a lifelong failure at keeping a diary:

I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

What, then, does matter?

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’); impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy (‘Mr. Acapulco’) Stauffer; careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside. I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line ‘That’s my old football number’ touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably ‘The Eighty-Yard Run.’ Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. (‘You’re the least important person in the room and don’t forget it,’ Jessica Mitford’s governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.

Once again, Didion returns to the egoic driver of the motive to write:

And so we do. But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

Ultimately, Didion sees the deepest value of the notebook as a reconciliation tool for the self and all of its iterations:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

[…]

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

The rest of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is brimming with the same kind of uncompromising insight, sharp and soft at the same time, on everything from morality to marriage to self-respect. Complement this particular portion with celebrated writers on the creative benefits of keeping a diary.

 About 2,000 pages of my journals chronicles, notebooks, morning musings, or whatever in the white binders.

July 30, 2022 to January 31, 2026

On the right are my watercolor sketchbooks chronicling Trump's reign from the outbreak of the Covid pandemic till the end of his first term of office.