{"id":167486,"date":"2024-05-07T10:15:51","date_gmt":"2024-05-07T14:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167486"},"modified":"2024-05-07T12:15:10","modified_gmt":"2024-05-07T16:15:10","slug":"second-selves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/05\/07\/second-selves\/","title":{"rendered":"Second Selves"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Vincent Van Gogh, Oleanders<\/em><\/a>, 1888. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

I.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jill Price has remembered every day of her life since she was fourteen years old. \u201cStarting on February 5, 1980, I remember everything,\u201d she said in an interview. \u201cThat was a Tuesday.\u201d She doesn\u2019t know what was so special about that Tuesday\u2014seemingly nothing\u2014but she knows it was a Tuesday. This is a common ability, or symptom, you might say, among people with the very rare condition of hyperthymesia\u2014excessive remembering\u2014also known as highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM. All sixty or so documented cases have a particular, visual way of organizing time in their minds, so their recall for dates is near perfect. If you throw them any date from their conscious lifetimes (it has to be a day they lived through\u2014 hyperthymesiacs are not better than average at history), they can tell you what day of the week it was and any major events that took place in the world; they can also tell you what they did that day, and in some cases what they were wearing, what they ate, what the weather was like, or what was on TV. One woman with HSAM, Markie Pasternak, describes her memory of the calendar as something like a Candy Land board, a winding path of colored squares (June is green, August yellow); when she \u201czooms in\u201d on a month, each week is like a seven-piece pie chart. Price sees individual years as circles, like clock faces, with December at the top and June at the bottom, the months arranged around the circle counterclockwise. All these years are mapped out on a timeline that reads from right to left, starting at 1900 and continuing until 1970, when the timeline takes a right-angle turn straight down, like the negative part of the y<\/em> axis. Why 1970? Perhaps because Price was born in 1965, and age five or six is usually when our \u201cchildhood amnesia\u201d wears off. Then we begin to remember our lives from our own perspective, as a more or less continuousexperience that somehow belongs to us. Nobody knows why we have so few memories from our earliest years\u2014whether it\u2019s because our brains don\u2019t yet have the capacity to store long-term memories, or because \u201cour forgetting is in overdrive,\u201d as Price writes in her memoir, The Woman Who Can\u2019t Forget<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Price was the first known case of HSAM. In June of 2000, feeling \u201chorribly alone\u201d in her crowded mind, she did an online search for \u201cmemory.\u201d In a stroke of improbable luck, the first result was for a memory researcher, James McGaugh, who was based at the University of California, Irvine, an hour away from her home in Los Angeles. On June 8, she sent him an email describing her unusual memory, and asking for help: \u201cWhenever I see a date flash on the television I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was and what I was doing. It is nonstop, uncontrollable, and totally exhausting.\u201d McGaugh responded almost immediately, wanting to meet her. Her first visit to his office was on Saturday, June 24. He tested her recall with a book called The 20th <\/em>Century Day by Day<\/em>, asking her what happened on a series of dates. The first date he gave her was November 5, 1979. She said it was a Monday, and that she didn\u2019t know of any significant events on that day, but that the previous day was the beginning of the Iran hostage crisis. McGaugh responded that it happened on the fifth, but she was \u201cso adamant\u201d he checked another source, and found that Price was right\u2014 the book was incorrect. The same thing happened when Diane Sawyer interviewed Price on 20\/20<\/em>. Sawyer, with an almanac on her lap, asked Price when Princess Grace died. \u201cSeptember 14, 1982,\u201d Price responded. \u201cThat was the first day I started twelfth grade.\u201d Sawyer flipped the pages and corrected her: \u201cSeptember 10, 1982.\u201d Price says, defiantly, the book might not be right. There\u2019s a tense moment, and then a voice shouts from backstage: \u201cThe book is wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

McGaugh and his research team also asked Price to recollect events from her own life. One day, \u201cwith no warning,\u201d they asked her to write out what she had done on every Easter since 1980. Within ten minutes, she had produced a list of entries, which they included in the paper they published about Price, or \u201cAJ,\u201d as they called her in the case notes, in 2006. The entries look like this:<\/p>\n

April 6, 1980\u00a0 9th Grade, Easter vacation ends<\/p>\n

April 19, 1981\u00a0 10th Grade, new boyfriend, H<\/p>\n

April 11, 1982\u00a0 11th Grade, grandparents visiting for Passover<\/p>\n

April 3, 1983\u00a0 12th Grade, just had second nose reconstruction<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It continues through 2003. The team was amazed, in part because the date that Easter Sunday falls on in any given year varies so much, and in part because Price is Jewish. McGaugh\u2019s team was able to verify the content of the entries because Price has kept detailed journals since 1976. She\u2019s protective of the journals; she doesn\u2019t like anyone to read them and she doesn\u2019t like to read them herself. But she showed them to the researchers, and she showed them to Barnaby Peel, the director of a 2012 documentary about hyperthymesia. The journal has \u201ceverything, everything, everything, everybody, everything,\u201d she tells Peel in the film. It\u2019s written in tiny print on calendar-grid pages held together with paper clips. \u201cI don\u2019t like lined paper,\u201d she says\u2014it feels too constricting. He asks her how often she rereads it, and she says, \u201cI don\u2019t reread any of it \u2026 I don\u2019t need to, I don\u2019t want to.\u201d She\u2019s defensive on this point because in 2009 the professor and science writer Gary Marcus wrote an article about her in Wired <\/em>that she hated. In it he claimed that her incredible memory was really a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the object of obsession her own life: \u201cWhy is her memory of her own history so extraordinary? The answer has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with personality. Price remembers so much about herself because she thinks about herself\u2014and her past\u2014almost constantly.\u201d He noted that \u201cone simple method\u201d of improving one\u2019s memory is keeping a journal. The implication, for Price, was that she was using her journals as a crib sheet, a study aid to memorize her days. \u201cI don\u2019t write this to remember,\u201d she says to Peel. \u201cI write it so I don\u2019t go crazy.”<\/p>\n

Hyperthymesiacs are prone to this kind of externalization, keeping some kind of ship\u2019s log to document their memories. Aurelien Hayman, a Welsh student who was twenty at the time he was featured in Peel\u2019s documentary, covered the walls of his bedroom with snapshots. Hayman thinks of photos as \u201cthe closest you can get to making a memory an object.\u201d A picture is \u201ca concrete memory\u201d\u2014a kind of verification that persists into the present and exists outside the head. Hayman\u2019s memories, like those of others with HSAM, are already highly visual, anautomatic memory palace. \u201cIt\u2019s like I could get a diary for 2009 and write it if I wanted to, retrospectively,\u201d he says\u2014he can see the \u201cimaginary pen writing in events in this sort of mental calendar.\u201d Bob Petrella, a stand-up comedian and TV producer, has a scrapbook-like album he calls by the recursive acronym B.O.B., “the Book of Bob.” He didn\u2019t write it in real time, like a diary, but re-created it from memory in 1999. It includes highlights from his life and a ranking of years from best to worst; his favorite year was 1983, and then 1985 and 2004 are tied. Petrella clearly takes joy in the book and in his memories, unlike Price, who, by the time she was in her thirties, when she wrote to McGaugh, was deeply depressed and overwhelmed by her memories\u2014by their volume, their hyperspecificity, their irrepressible immersiveness. Everyone has cues that will trigger certain memories, but for Price the cues are constant and the memories inescapable. \u201cIt\u2019s as though I have all of my prior selves still inside me,\u201d she writes in her memoir. If anything reminds her of a bad day, essentially she has to live the day again. She feels she is in those moments\u2014living both the past and present, like a \u201csplit screen\u201d\u2014and the pain still hurts. She often falls into a pattern that she calls \u201cY diagramming,\u201d going back over her choices and all of their consequences: \u201cIf I hadn\u2019t done this, then that wouldn\u2019t have happened \u2026 It has instilled in me an acute, persistent regret.\u201d It\u2019s the line of causation that haunts her\u2014she can see all the causes going back for forty years so clearly. Hyperthymesiacs can seem to get lost in the past; the remembering takes so much time. (Borges\u2019s \u201cFunes the Memorious\u201d is a fictional hyperthymesiac: \u201cHe could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day.\u201d)<\/p>\n

There have been periods when Price stopped journaling for a while, but eventually \u201cthe swirl\u201d in her head, the cascade of days, would get out of control and she would realize she \u201chad to go back and get all of that time down.\u201d She\u2019d then reconstruct the missing time day by day after the fact\u2014she remembered the details whether or not she had written them down. It happens, the remembering, with no conscious effort. The journal is \u201ca physical and emotional reassurance that the event really happened,\u201d she writes. \u201cI can\u2019t accept living with just the memory. It has to be tangible\u2014something I can hold on to physically, something I can handle.\u201d By \u201chandle,\u201d I think she means both that she can touch it and that, because she can touch it, she can process and accept it; she can cope with the overpowering reality of reality. Most of us can cope with it, insofar as we can cope with it, because the reality passes so quickly and then begins to fade. (I think of Rilke, the end of \u201cPortrait of My Father as a Young Man\u201d: \u201cOh quickly disappearing photograph \/ in my more slowly disappearing hand.\u201d) McGaugh\u2019s team believes that Price\u2019s condition is not an ability\u2014a skill one can develop, like the people who memorize digits of pi or the order of cards in a deck\u2014so much as a disability. Her brain is very bad at forgetting\u2014Price claims she has never misplaced anything, never once lost her wallet or her keys\u2014but forgetting helps us live. Life, experienced once, in its excruciating fullness, is enough. As Ernest Becker writes in The Denial of Death<\/em>, \u201cfull humanness means full fear and trembling.\u201d \u201cLife itself is the insurmountable problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her memoir, Price writes about \u201cthe memory bump,\u201d the spike in autobiographical memories that most people have between the ages of ten and thirty, a time that includes lots of novel experiences and during which people are actively forming their sense of themselves. She cites a study described in Psychology Today<\/em>: \u201cIf you ask college students to tell you their most important memories, and then surprise them six months later by asking again, they will repeat stories at a rate of just 12 percent \u2026 Even when asked specifically, \u2018What is your first memory?\u2019 subjects will rarely mention the same one twice.\u201d So even though we have more memories during this period, or perhaps because we have more memories, the importance we assign to our memories is in flux. Our personalities, our selves, are likewise in flux; we choose the memories that serve our going narrative at the time. These narratives seem to be culture-bound; that is, they follow templates we absorb from the culture. Americans, according to the psychologist Dan McAdams, are drawn to redemption narratives, which frame the star as a hero, and to their counterpart\u2014the \u201ccontamination narrative,\u201d the idea that a certain event ruined everything afterward. Price thinks her memory changed irrevocably when she was eight years old and her father moved the family from New York City, where she\u2019d had an idyllically happy childhood, to California for a job. But her highly specific memory didn\u2019t really feel excessive, didn\u2019t come to be a burden, until her twenties, when her life became unstable. Her mother almost died during surgery; her grandparents fell ill and died; her parents started fighting and eventually separated. So much change and strife, recalled in all its particulars, was too much for Price. She did not have the luxury of \u201cchoosing\u201d to forget what she couldn\u2019t accept.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something strange about HSAM I never see mentioned. Price\u2019s father was an entertainment agent\u2014he worked for the man who discovered Jim Henson, and she used to go with him to tapings of The Ed Sullivan Show<\/em>, before they moved to California. Her mother was a dancer in a troupe that appeared on Broadway and TV in the forties and fifties. Price\u2019s first job was in TV, and she says she\u2019s \u201ca TV fanatic.\u201d (In addition to her journals, she collects all kinds of objects and data from her life, and indexes the data: \u201cIn 1982 I started to make tapes of songs off the radio that I labeled meticulously by season and year, and I kept that up until 2003. I still have all of those tapes. In late 1988, I started making videos of TV shows, and I have a collection of close to a thousand of them. I also started an entertainment log in August 1989 in which I wrote down the name of every record, tape, CD, video, DVD, and 45 that I own.\u201d If memory is an index, Price also has an index to the index.) When Barnaby Peel quizzes Aurelien Hayman about what happened on June 17, 2008, one of the things Haymen mentions (after clicking his tongue while thinking, a sound like a Rolodex, or the numbers turning over on an old-fashioned flip clock) is that Joan Rivers was thrown off a talk show for swearing. He can call up the dates that specific episodes of Big Brother <\/em>aired\u2014but bristles at any suggestion it means\u00a0he\u2019s \u201cobsessed\u201d with the show. He says it means nothing to him. Bob Petrella worked in TV. The actress Marilu Henner is another of the few known people with HSAM. She describes her memory of a year as something like \u201cselected scenes on a DVD.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s like time travel,\u201d she says on a CBS clip. \u201cI\u2019m back looking through my eyes.\u201d In a 60 Minutes <\/em>segment from 2010, an interviewer asks her about a random episode of Taxi <\/em>filmed more than thirty years earlier, in 1978. (The show ran for five seasons, 114 episodes.) She instantly remembers the dress she was wearing and one of Tony Danza\u2019s lines.<\/p>\n

Why are so many of the well-known examples of hyperthymesia involved somehow with TV? Is it because TV helped them discover one another? Or because people who watch a lot of TV were more likely to hear about Jill Price and Marilu Henner and realize they weren\u2019t alone? I thought so at first, but now I wonder if HSAM is actually a post-TV condition, a disease of modernity\u2014if it is a disease. (Henner is a happy person\u2014maybe it helps that she\u2019s rich and famous\u2014but most people with hyperthymesia have difficult lives. For Alexandra Wolff, it feels as if \u201cthere are no fresh days, no clean slates without association.\u201d Another person with HSAM, Bill Brown, told an NPR reporter that he\u2019d been in touch with most of the known cases, and that all of them had struggled with depression and very few\u2014only two\u2014had maintained long marriages.) In his book The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are<\/em>, the historian David M. Henkin discusses the invention of the week. Unlike years (defined as the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun) and months (which are based on the cycles of the moon), weeks are wholly man-made. The\u00a0seven-day week has been around for centuries, but according to Henkin, television schedules helped solidify weeks as the stranglehold unit of our lives: \u201cSaturday afternoon movies, weekly sitcom serials, and colossal cultural institutions such as Monday Night Football <\/em>played a far greater role in structuring the American week than Wednesday theater matinees a century earlier, because they reached so many more people and faced so little competition.\u201d Maybe TV, as trains did before it, fundamentally altered how we think about time.<\/p>\n

Jill Price has said that when she dies, she wants her journals, those external memories, to be buried with her body or \u201cblown up in the desert,\u201d a literally Kafkaesque request. It\u2019s a refusal of the hope of \u201clife\u201d after death. If someone else could read her journals, Price\u2019s days might be lived through yet again\u2014a prospect she must find gruesome and also unnecessary. (Freud reportedly once said, after fainting, \u201cHow sweet it must be to die.\u201d) A journal is an effigy of the self, or else is the self, the self that exists because we create it. I am no longer sure, for the record, what people mean when they say that the self is illusory. Isn\u2019t it here? Here where I sit, and in what I am writing? Isn\u2019t it just my singular memory? Price understands this. The self dies with the self.<\/p>\n

II.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m interested in the journals of writers (I suppose anyone who writes journals is a writer) as sites of self-loathing, of disappointment and failure. In his preface to A Writer\u2019s Diary<\/em>, the volume of extracts from Virginia Woolf\u2019s diaries that he edited, Leonard Woolf remarks that, even taken in full, \u201cdiaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait,\u201d because \u201cone gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood\u2014irritation or misery, say\u2014and of not writing one\u2019s diary when one is feeling the opposite.\u201d Max Brod writes something similar in his postscript to Kafka\u2019s diaries, which he published against his friend\u2019s wish that they be \u201cburned unread\u201d: \u201cOne must in general take into consideration the false impression that every diary unintentionally makes. When you keep a diary, you usually put down only what is oppressive or irritating. By being put down on paper painful impressions are got rid of.\u201d We can use as a kind of confessional, a place to expurgate our worst thoughts\u2014so we don\u2019t \u201cgo crazy.\u201d Susan Sontag\u2019s son, David Rieff, in his preface to Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947\u20131963<\/em>, identifies the two primary moods of his mother\u2019s notebooks as \u201cpain and ambition.\u201d He writes of wanting to argue with her as he read them, to shout, \u201cDon\u2019t do it,\u201d the way Sontag had seen the audience at a performance in Greece shout out at Medea. These editors were close to the authors, and must have felt their own impressions of the authors as people were more correct, more complete, than the version preserved in the diaries. But I\u2019m not sure that follows. Aren\u2019t the grim, unflattering things you only share with your diary in a way your truer self? The self you are alone, in what Sontag calls \u201cthe ecstasy of aloneness\u201d? Yet she also writes, \u201cI know I\u2019m not myself with people \u2026 But am I myself alone? That seems unlikely too.\u201d If there is no one self, you can never be yourself, only one of yourselves.<\/p>\n

Sontag was prone to making lists of resolutions, lists of qualities she hated, lists of books to read and reread and of art and films to see\u2014lists as a method of betterment. The very first entry in her notebook from 1947 is a list of beliefs, which begins:<\/p>\n

\n

I believe:<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/strong> That there is no personal god or life after death
\n\u2022 <\/strong>That the most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e. Honesty
\n\u2022 <\/strong>That the only difference between human beings is intelligence<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She was fourteen years old\u2014and already conceived of writing as commitment to belief. In 1948 she writes: \u201cIt is useless for me to record only the satisfying parts of my existence\u2014(There are too few of them anyway!) Let me note all the sickening waste of today, that I shall not be easy with myself and compromise my tomorrows.\u201d This is writing as a way of making truth more true, if not creating truth out of nothing. Her notebooks, she writes, coincide with her \u201creal awakening to life\u201d: \u201cThis has been a necessity for me for the last four years: to document + structure my experiences \u2026 to be fully conscious at every moment which means feeling the past to be as real as the present.\u201d The journals are a sort of supermemory, a more reliable and permanent record of experience, and of consciousness itself, which can\u2019t quite be captured outside writing, with a photo album, say\u2014one could only guess at the moods and arrangements behind the pictures. Some writers keep a notebook as asidecar, a paratext, while writing another book, to capture ideas and excess material and feelings aboutthe process. A diary, then, is the footnotes to the project of our lives, to the self as a project.<\/p>\n

Ten years later, in 1957, Sontag writes this (unconscious?) revision to her list:<\/p>\n

What do I believe? In the private life<\/p>\n

In holding up culture<\/p>\n

In music, Shakespeare, old buildings<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She adds, this time, a list of things she enjoys (music, again; being in love; sleeping) and a list of her faults:<\/p>\n

Never on time<\/p>\n

Lying, talking too much Laziness<\/p>\n

No volition for refusal<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This distaste for talking, her own speech, comes up again and again: \u201cThe leakage of talk. My mind is dribbling out through my mouth.\u201d \u201cI am sick of having opinions, I am sick of talking.\u201d \u201cImportant to become less interesting. To talk less, repeat more, save thinking for writing.\u201d Conversation competes with writing. In 1954 and 1955, the middle years of her marriage to Philip Rieff, the entries are scant. \u201cSpeech is so much easier + more copious compared to the labor of keeping a journal,\u201d she notes. She\u2019s not writing much because she\u2019s not alone\u2014there is somewhere else for the language to go. (I remember, during the early pandemic, when we saw fewer people, I felt overburdened by language; all these things I would say, they were trapped in my mind. And writing them down made me feel less lonely, even if I didn\u2019t think anyone would read what I\u2019d written.)<\/p>\n

But Sontag doesn\u2019t value what\u2019s easy, and would rather put the language into writing. \u201cFrom now on I\u2019m going to write every bloody thing that comes into my head \u2026 I don\u2019t care if it\u2019s lousy. The only way to learn how to write is to write.\u201d In 1957, when she separates from Rieff, the notebooks fill up again\u2014there\u2019s no one else to observe her. Being self-conscious, she writes, is \u201ctreating one\u2019s self as an other.\u201d (That\u2019s one of those thoughts I had thought of as mine.) In an entry labeled \u201cOn Keeping a Journal,\u201d she writes, \u201cI do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood \u2026 It does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather\u2014in many cases\u2014offers an alternative to it.\u201d The journal forms a parallel universe, a better reality. I am struck by Sontag\u2019s ambition not just for fame and success but for real moral excellence. She wants to be a person who deserves success. She really wants to change.<\/p>\n

In 1960, she writes a number of entries on a trait she calls \u201cX,\u201d or \u201cX-iness,\u201d the need to be liked, to please and impress other people, which she sees as very American, and which encourages her \u201ctendency to be indiscreet,\u201d to gossip and name-drop (\u201cHow many times have I told people that Pearl Kazin was a major girlfriend of Dylan Thomas? That Norman Mailer has orgies?\u201d). X is why she\u2019s a\u201chabitual liar\u201d\u2014\u201clies are what I think the other person wants to hear.\u201d \u201cAll the things I despise in myself are X: being a moral coward \u2026 being phony, being passive.\u201d \u201cPeople who have pride don\u2019t awaken the X in us,\u201d she writes; pride is \u201cthe secret weapon,\u201d the \u201cX-cide.\u201d She hasn\u2019t solved this problem in herself by 1961; she\u2019s still telling herself \u201cto smile less, talk less\u201d \u2026 \u201cnot to make fun of people, be catty.\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t smile so much, sit up straight, bathe every day, and above all Don\u2019t Say It, all those sentences that come ready-to-say on the tickertape at the back of my tongue.\u201d It\u2019s hard to imagine, despite all this evidence, that Sontag was ever a suck-up or a people pleaser, someone who smiled too much or too ingratiatingly. I have watched many times, though it makes me squirm, a clip of her speaking to Christopher Lydon, in 1992, with utter and withering contempt. Her only smiles are pitying. She dismisses all his questions as unserious. We can see she\u2019s achieved it, fame of course but also pride, the vanquishing of X.<\/p>\n

Gide also made lists in his journals, lists of commitments and theories of living (\u201cOne ought never to buy anything except with love\u201d \u2026 \u201cTake<\/em> upon oneself as much humanity as <\/em>possible<\/em>. There is the correct formula\u201d) and \u201crules of conduct.\u201d From an entry in 1890:<\/p>\n

Pay no attention to appearing<\/em>. Being <\/em>is alone important.<\/p>\n

And do not long, through vanity, for a too hasty manifestation of one\u2019s essence.<\/p>\n

Whence: do not seek to be <\/em>through the vain desire to appear<\/em>; but rather because it is fitting <\/em>to be so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He frequently chided himself: \u201cI must stop puffing up my pride (in this notebook) just for the sake of doing as Stendhal did.\u201d When Sontag read Gide\u2019s journals, she identified so deeply with his thinking that she wrote, \u201cI am not only reading this book, but creating it myself\u201d: \u201cGide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion \u2026 Thus I do not think: \u2018How marvelously lucid this is!\u2019\u2014but: \u2018Stop! I cannot think this fast!\u2019 \u201d Delightfully, Woolf felt the same, reading his journals in 1934: \u201cFull of startling recollection\u2014 things I could have said myself.\u201d (When I mentioned this coincidence to my husband, John, he looked at me wide-eyed\u2014\u201cThat\u2019s how I\u2019ve <\/em>always felt.\u201d)\u201cRecollection\u201d is an odd word, here\u2014 did she mean recognition? It suggests she remembers Gide\u2019s thoughts, experiences Gide\u2019s thoughts as memories, the way she does when rereading her own writing. (\u201cTo freshen my memory of the war, I read some old diaries.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Woolf, like Sontag, would periodically go through and annotate her old journals after the fact, adding comments and asides and corrections of a sort. In late October of 1931, she notes the updated sales figures for The Waves <\/em>(\u201cIt has sold about 6,500 today \u2026 but will stop now, I suppose\u201d) in the margin of an entry dated January 26, 1930, where she\u2019d guessed \u201c[it] won\u2019t sell more than 2,000 copies.\u201d To an entry about Arnold Bennett she adds: \u201cSoon after this A.B. went to France, drank a glass of water and died of typhoid.\u201d In an entry dated April 27, 1925, Woolf notes that The Common Reader <\/em>has been out five days and \u201cso far I have not heard a word about it, private or public; it is as if one tossed a stone into a pond and the waters closed without a ripple.\u201d But she claims she is \u201cperfectly content\u201d with this silence; she cares less than she has ever cared. (I love Woolf\u2019s continual insistence that she\u2019s indifferent to her fame and her work\u2019s reception. In response to a \u201csneering review\u201d two months later, she assures herself, \u201cSo from this I prognosticate a good deal of criticism on the ground that I\u2019m obscure and odd; and some enthusiasm; and a slow sale, and an increased reputation. Oh yes, my reputation increases.\u201d Once she knew she had fame she found it \u201cvulgar and a nuisance.\u201d I love the\u00a0vanity of writers, and of famous dead writers especially.) In that same April entry, she digresses: \u201cMy present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: and I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness etc.\u201d In the margin, she has added, at some point, \u201cSecond selves is what I mean.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who is Woolf lying to, if she is lying, in these diaries? Herself, a little bit, the second self that is the diary, and the future Virginia, who might as well be another person entirely. In 1919, she writes, \u201cI am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better.\u201d Later that year: \u201cWhat a bore I\u2019m becoming! Yes, even old Virginia will skip a good deal of this.\u201d At the age of thirty-eight, she writes:<\/p>\n

In spite of some tremors I think I shall go on with this diary for the present. I sometimes think that I have worked through the layer of style which suited it\u2014suited the comfortable bright hour after tea; and the thing I\u2019ve reached now is less pliable. Never mind; I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920 will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost; and take heed that I don\u2019t think 50 a very great age.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems we can\u2019t help but imagine an audience when we write. Because a journal makes the self external, the self counts as an audience. But I also think Woolf and Sontag, in saving their journals, just must have imagined that others might read them as well. They must have, because they loved reading writers\u2019 diaries. Sontag read Kafka\u2019s diaries. Kafka read Goethe\u2019s: \u201cDistance already holds this life firm in tranquility, these diaries set fire to it. The clarity of all the events makes it mysterious.\u201d (The next day he writes, \u201cHow do I excuse yesterday\u2019s remark about Goethe [which is almost as untrue as the feeling it describes, for the true feeling was driven away by my sister]? In no way.\u201d For Kafka, contra Sontag, writing the thing often made it less <\/em>true, reduced the verity of pure thought to lies. \u201cNothing in the world is further removed from an experience \u2026 than its description.\u201d The words spoil reality.) Plath read Woolf\u2019s: \u201cJust now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper\u2019s (no less!\u2014and I hardly can believe that the big ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock and sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her somehow.\u201d So did Eudora Welty, who quotes or, rather, misquotes from Woolf\u2019s diary in her Paris Review <\/em>interview: \u201cAny day you open it to will be tragic, and yet all the marvelous things she says about her work, about working, leave you filled with joy that\u2019s stronger than your misery for her. Remember\u2014 \u2018I\u2019m not very far along, but I think I have my statues against the sky\u2019? Isn\u2019t that beautiful?\u201d Woolf\u2019s exact quote is: \u201cIt is bound to be very imperfect. But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky.\u201d (This makes me think of Czapski: \u201cThere\u2019s nothing easier than to quote a text precisely \u2026 It\u2019s far more difficult to assimilate a quotation to the point where it becomes yours and becomes part of you.\u201d)<\/p>\n

A journal\u2014any writing\u2014is a chance at immortality, or if not eternal life, at least a little more life, a little more after death. Rieff notes that his mother died \u201cwithout leaving any instructions as to what to do with either her papers or her uncollected or unfinished writing.\u201d It makes sense because she didn\u2019t really believe she would die, as he describes in his own memoir of Sontag\u2019s terminal cancer. He contrasts her death to Simone de Beauvoir\u2019s mother\u2019s death, which she called \u201ca very easy death\u201d\u2014with no internet, and differing medical ethics at the time, Beauvoir\u2019s mother died in ignorance of the severity of her illness. Sontag had no such luck, and though she knew intellectually how slim her odds of survival were, she couldn\u2019t help but hold out hope, even inside or beside her despair, and continued to make lists and notes and plans for travel and projects, \u201cfighting to the end for another shard of the future.\u201d She was willing \u201cto undergo any amount of suffering,\u201d according to Rieff, for a chance at more life, this despite her depression: she \u201cwanted to live, unhappy, for as long as she possibly could.\u201d Woolf, although she killed herself, seemed also to believe she might not die\u2014in 1926 she writes, \u201cBut what is to become of all these diaries, I asked myself yesterday. If I died, what would Leo make of them?\u201d If! Ernest Becker would say no one really does or can believe it: \u201cOur organism is ready to fill the world all alone \u2026 This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn\u2019t feel that he <\/em>will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Woolf wanted her diary \u201cto be so elastic that it will embrace anything\u201d\u2014as she had said the previous year of Byron\u2019s Don Juan<\/em>, that the poem had an elastic shape that could hold any thought that came into his head, or as she\u00a0said of the new form of novel she\u2019d begun in 1920, which became Mrs. Dalloway<\/em>, a form with \u201clooseness and lightness\u201d that could \u201cenclose everything, everything.\u201d Like Jill Price\u2019s journals, the journals holding \u201ceverything, everything, everything, everybody, everything.\u201d A comprehensive diary exposes the near infinity of detail in a life, even a life as short as Plath\u2019s\u2014the index to Plath\u2019s unabridged journals is almost thirty pages long and contains entries for apartheid, Louis Armstrong, the Aztecs, Brigitte Bardot, bees, Sid Caesar, Alexander Calder, Un Chien Andalou<\/em>, circumcision, Marie Curie, demonic possession, the Detroit Tigers, Amelia Earhart, the Eiffel Tower, Paul Gauguin, Adolf Hitler, need I go on? Perhaps a life actually is infinite, like the points between zero and one on a number line. You could always make the journal longer, write in a finer degree of detail, add in more sense and observation, that is, if you had the time.<\/p>\n

Woolf also wanted her published books to be more like the diaries. \u201cSuppose one can keep the quality of a sketch in a finished and composed work? That is my endeavor.\u201d This is part of the beauty of journals\u2014they remain forever sketchy, with the un-worked-over magic of first drafts. \u201cIt strikes me that in this book I practice writing; do my scales.\u201d This in 1924: \u201cAnd old V. of 1940 will see something in it too. She will be a woman who can see, old V., everything\u2014 more than I can, I think.\u201d Here is a bit of the tragedy Welty referred to. By 1940 life was very difficult for Woolf, and not only because of the war, though the war is heavy too, inescapable as atmosphere: \u201cOne ceases to think about it\u2014 that\u2019s all. Goes on discussing the new room, new chair, new books. What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do?\u201d Her friends\u2019 deaths have been hard: \u201cThere seems to be some sort of reproach to me \u2026 I go on; and they cease. Why?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s life lessened\u201d\u2014less life overall; their deaths seem to sap life from her. After Roger Fry\u2019s funeral, she writes: \u201cA fear then came to me, of death. Of course I shall lie there too before that gate and slide in; and it frightened me.\u201d (How like Berryman\u2019s lines: \u201cSuddenly, unlike Bach, \/\/ & horribly, unlike Bach, it occurred to me \/ that one <\/em>night, instead of warm pajamas, \/ I\u2019d take off all my clothes \/& cross the damp cold lawn & down the bluff \/ into the terrible water & walk forever \/ under it out toward the island.\u201d) Seeing more, knowing more, having more to remember\u2014it all has a cost, a weight.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of her life, Woolf seemed to begin to view death as release from the fear of death. She writes more and more of death. On Sunday, June 9, 1940: \u201cI don\u2019t want to go to bed at midday: this refers to the garage.\u201d (\u201cThe garage\u201d is where Leonard had stashed away petrol, for use in the case that Hitler should win.) \u201cIt struck me that one curious feeling is, that the writing \u2018I\u2019 has vanished. No audience. No echo. That\u2019s part of one\u2019s death \u2026 this disparition of an echo.\u201d On June 22: \u201cIf this is my last lap, oughtn\u2019t I to read Shakespeare? But can\u2019t. \u2026 Oughtn\u2019t I to finish something by way of an end?\u201d The war, she feels, \u201chas taken away the outer wall of security\u201d; \u201cno echo comes back\u201d; \u201cI mean, there is no \u2018autumn,\u2019 no winter. We pour to the edge of a precipice and then? I can\u2019t conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.\u201d (There wasn\u2019t, for her.) On July 24: \u201cI make these notes, but am tired of notes, tired of Gide.\u201d On September 16: \u201cMabel [the cook] stumped off \u2026\u00a0\u2018I hope we shall meet again,\u2019 I said. She said \u2018Oh no doubt\u2019 thinking I referred to death.\u201d On October 2: \u201cWhy try again to make the familiar catalogue, from which something escapes. Should I think of death?\u201d She tries to imagine \u201chow one\u2019s killed by a bomb\u201d:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got it fairly vivid\u2014the sensation: but can\u2019t see anything but suffocating nonentity following after \u2026 It\u2014I mean death; no, the scrunching and scrambling, the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye and brain: the process of putting out the light\u2014painful? Yes. Terrifying. I suppose so. Then a swoon; a drain; two or three gulps attempting consciousness\u2014and then dot dot dot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In her very last entry, written on March 8, 1941, she seems almost happy. She\u2019s been to hear Leonard give a speech in Brighton. \u201cLike a foreign town: the first spring day. Women sitting on seats. A pretty hat in a teashop\u2014how fashion revives the eye!\u201d She recommits to Henry James\u2019s command to \u201cobserve perpetually.\u201d Like Sontag she imagines a future, a prescription for old Virginia: \u201cSuppose I bought a ticket at the Museum; biked in daily and read history \u2026 Occupation is essential.\u201d \u201cAnd now,\u201d she concludes, \u201cwith some pleasure I find that it\u2019s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.\u201d<\/p>\n

III.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A friend of mine told me her journals are not retrospective, a record of time past\u2014instead, they look forward, a record of plans and ideas and projections, sources of excitement and hope. I once wrote in a notebook, \u201cI hate hope, and yet \u2026\u201d (And yet what\u2014I need it? I don\u2019t believe in free will, but I can\u2019t help behaving as though I have it. In that sense, free will is automatic. It springs eternal.) I once wrote in a notebook, \u201cUnderlining books makes me want to return to them and reminds me of hiding \u2018treasure\u2019 (coins or candy) in my room as a kid, to forget and find later.\u201d I think I use notebooks for the same reason, as a way of hiding \u201ctreasure\u201d for myself, for old E. I record events sometimes, date the entries sometimes\u2014on September 25, 2021, I wrote: \u201cI remember, the night before John\u2019s father died, they said, He\u2019s doing a little better. He ate all his peaches<\/em>.\u201d On September 15, 2021, I wrote: \u201cI\u2019m starting to remember the bleakness of 2020 fondly\u2014well, not the bleakness exactly, but the moments of non-bleakness\u2014making a lot of banana bread. Huddling around a kerosene camp heater on Mike\u2019s balcony. Xmas.\u201d\u00a0 To be more exact, I recorded the memories, not the events. (Woolf, in 1933: \u201cIt\u2019s a queer thing that I write a date. Perhaps in this disoriented life one thinks, if I can say what day it is, then \u2026 Three dots to signify I don\u2019t know what I mean.\u201d)<\/p>\n

But mostly they\u2019re undated, mostly they are thoughts out of nowhere. In 2021, according to my notebooks, I thought a lot about Sartre\u2019s bad faith, or mauvaise foi<\/em>\u2014the moments when we recognize the anguish of our freedom, which he called \u201cnegative ecstasy.\u201d Kierkegaard called it \u201cthe dizziness of freedom,\u201d those glimpses of the way out of the trap. Why do we always look away and never take that path out? I wrote \u201cINERTIA & UNCERTAINTY\u201d in all caps at the top of a page. I wrote \u201cTHIS CONNECTION BETWEEN JOURNALS & MEMORY.\u201d I put asterisks next to the interesting thoughts, the thoughts that wanted more thinking, a map to the treasure. Proof that thoughts were had. The disconnected thoughts are always me, are they not? Proof of continuity? \u201cIn the diary you find proof,\u201d Kafka writes, \u201cthat this right hand moved then as it does today.\u201d We need proof of our lives, and we need it while we live.<\/p>\n

I wrote in August, as shorthand, \u201cMemory\u2014New Orleans.\u201d I know what I meant by this. WhenI was nineteen years old, I went to Mardi Gras with my brother, my roommate, and several other college friends and got as drunk as I\u2019ve ever been, so insensibly drunk that I famously spiked a frozen hurricane, which, according to most recipes, already has four ounces of rum, with more rum from a flask, and blacked out standing up, such that I recall coming to in the arms of a stranger wearing skull beads. The beads were little skulls, memento mori. Later I looked so green in the very long line for the bathroom at Caf\u00e9 du Monde that they let me skip to the front. I don\u2019t remember getting back to the hotel that night. The next day, my roommate, who was sharing a bed with me, told me that I\u2019d puked on the sheets, so she\u2019d yanked them off the bed and thrown them into the bathtub, and when she\u2019d tried to pull the little decorative coverlet over us for warmth, I had told her, \u201cThey don\u2019t wash those.\u201d I swear this was the first time I ever heard that hotels don\u2019t wash the coverlets\u2014when my friend told me I <\/em>had told her <\/em>so. My drunken mind had knowledge I didn\u2019t. When I told John this story, he didn\u2019t seem surprised. I guess when you\u2019re so drunk you aren\u2019t even there, you really are someone different. (Dot dot dot.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elisa Gabbert<\/span> is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently<\/em> Normal Distance\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays. She writes the<\/em> On Poetry column for <\/em>the New York Times, and her work has appeared recently in<\/em> Harper\u2019s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and<\/em> The Believer. This essay is adapted from<\/em> Any Person is the Only Self<\/a>, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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