Running for Your Life: Paper Mate

In June 1983, I began the practice of writing in a journal.

That’s more than 35 years ago.

Granted we’re not talking about daily journal-writing for 35 years, or 23,000 days, give or take.

But I don’t let any of it go. Once written in a journal (ringed-paper variety these days for ease of flat-surface writing) the treasure is kept on a shelf in my home studio.

In that workspace I’m literally surrounded by pages and pages of cursive writing.

As I mine material for a new memoir I find myself re-reading journals.

Dipping into the past I see the younger me, desire for connection, observations from the surprising to the mundane.

Themes emerge, passions, some lost, some still budding.

I’m in a subway car as I write this. (I transcribe – and edit corrections – of my journal-writing in this space). I use a carefully chosen black ink craftsman pen.

Each letter is owned, idiosyncratically mine.

At times a face in the crowd attracts my attention and I pause with a few strokes on paper, capture something about that person, a mood, with the simple goal of showing one defining  feature.

The sketch, with accompanying script, makes a distinguishing mark on that brief occasion, both about the subject and me.

Max Ferber, a fictional character in Sebald’s “The Emigrants,” says, “Time is nothing but the disquiet of the soul.”

Maybe that is what I’ve done in this half-lifetime of journal-writing. Put in words, in this most modest way, an account of the disquiet of the soul.

Next: Running for Your Life: Ant Heel