Pitfalls of Reading and Writing

It pleases me to say that I am writing again. I'm writing here, on this blog, which is sort of an on-line journal where I can make statements, get feedback, and keep track of interesting things I will enjoy remembering about my baby's childhood. Remember that word: journal.

Last weekend I picked up my book journal for the first time in two years perhaps. It is a really adorable little book that a friend brought me from San Franscisco, and it is a joy to write in. Writing in this book will help me to remember things that I have read, to make notes on those things I really want to remember, and even analyse things I do not fully understand. It is a slightly more personal set of notes, but it is also a resource for ideas I may want to address publicly in the future. But there's that word again: journal.

Also last weekend, I picked up a very nice cloth bound journal that my sister-in-law got for me a few years ago. I've written in it off and on over the years, and I specifically picked it up last weekend to note something Michael said that was encouraging concerning our marriage. This is the most personal of the journals that I keep. Journal.

I also have a cloth bound calandar that I use to make notes about Parker, the type of stuff I get asked by other mother's from time to time, for instance, when he started sleeping through the night, etc. It also keeps up with appointments, the occasional to-do list, and things I might want to add to the baby book later. It's actually sort of like another journal.

So this morning I picked up Surprised by Joy to try and find the quotation I mentioned earlier this week. Thanks to Jim I've connected what Lewis says about the dangers of introspection to one of the points Lewis makes in A Grief Observed (more on that later, I hope), so imagine my surprise when I came across the following quote:

"If Theism had done nothing else for me, I should still be thankful that it cured me of the time-wasting and foolish practice of keeping a diary."

Finding this amongst my most thoroughly admired author's writings both startled and amused me because journal-keeping is one of my most prized activities. Of course, when Lewis said this I think that he was referring to a different use than mine, because he goes on to say,

"Even for autobiographical purposes a diary is nothing like so useful as I had hoped. You put down each day what you think is important; but of course you cannot each day see what will prove to have been important in the long run (233)."

In my better moments journaling for me has been more like praying, which for Lewis became a mode of extraversion. But he makes a good point (or criticism), and I don't know yet what I'm going to do with it.