Notches in time

“‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.”

So wrote 20-year-old Henry David Thoreau in 1837, encouraged by his friend Emerson. The result was two million words in 14 volumes, composed in the remaining 24 years of a life foreshortened by tuberculosis. According to Walden.org, Thoreau's journal "was his most prized possession and the only one he kept locked up when he went out for walks while living at Walden Pond." He did not suffer the possession of too much stuff.

Younger Daughter (like Older Daughter) has expressed literary ambitions, and has even proposed a collaboration. I'd be honored. Tomorrow she turns 22. I'm going to ask her the question Emerson asked Henry, and present her with the elegant blank book I've been holding on to for a while now. It seems too pretty to mar with my inelegant script, but I think she's its rightful owner. 

A writer's journal is more than a diary, it's a receptacle for all kinds of miscellany (they actually used to call them Miscellany Books, and Day Books), random quotes, fleeting thoughts, partially-baked ideas, project reminders, recipes, notes-to-self... it's a bin for the seed-corn that may one day grow into something lovely and nourishing. 

And if it doesn't, well, the nectar is in the journey. Or maybe the better metaphor of the writing process is Henry's own. "In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line."

Remember Henry's hike, Younger Daughter?

Or as Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury intimate Vita Sackville-West wrote to her,

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”

Notch the stick, toe the line, snag the butterfly, enjoy the journey. Writing isn't always easy , but often enough it is its own reward.