What was it my aunt was writing all those years? Lined up on one of her bookcases were over a dozen journals—all the same size—the only variations being in the binding details. I have myself had a number of these journals, as they’re often the easiest to find in any bookstore. My aunt must still have them, lined up on a shelf in a new house I’ve never visited. Some years ago, a friend loaned me a copy of When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, by Terry Tempest Williams. One of the characters in When Women Were Birds is a set of journals inherited by the author on the death of her mother. Williams’ family is from Utah, are practicing Mormons and, as Williams explains, for Mormon women the tradition of keeping a journal is a longstanding one—it was the women who kept the stories as the Mormons moved slowly, over the decades, from New York, where they started, to the deserts of the southwest. What made the journals Williams inherited remarkable were not any stories they contained—not any family secrets, feuds or grudges revealed—what was remarkable about the journals was that they were, every one of them—one volume for each year—blank. Not one word, not one mark in those thousands of pages, not one word for all those decades of collecting journals, lining them up on the shelf, year on year.
I think it must still, for the most part, be women who keep this tradition—recording the story as we live it. I think of my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother, and all the letters they exchanged. I do not know that any of them ever kept journals, I only know that in those envelopes as they came and went, the stories of all our lives were being told. I have become a sporadic letter writer these last few years, but I have become much more disciplined about keeping a journal as I have grown older. Year after year I fill up notebooks, and what I write down and forget is there, waiting for a day I will open them up, and there it will be—the story, my story—or what I have captured of it. Right now all of those journals from my past (and letters, cards, notebooks full of poetry and essays) are in boxes in my mother’s basement. Someday, after I am reunited with my personal archive, I will slowly go through it all—walk twenty years and more into history—into my history—and revisit all those selves I used to be, and the many wonderful characters I have loved and know I will find them there, still offering advice or helping me get into trouble.
A few days ago I was driving with a friend, and as we drew closer to Ericeira and the ocean and the fog, the conversation turned to writing and keeping journals and what it is to look back and see your story, and all the other stories you capture—people you met, the stories they told you; the stories you wrote down in cafés because people are talking and don’t know you’re sitting there like Mata Hari, writing it all down—silently spying on someone else’s life; every secret longing, joy and crushing rejection—every dashed dream and every small triumph. Memory is subject to influence and the subtlety of our experience gets lost with time, revised and edited until the memory has become a collage, losing the sharp luster of clarity it did so soon after being formed. It is humanizing to revisit the people we once were— people who are necessarily younger, less experienced—and to have compassion for them, for their complaints or lofty expectations or naiveté, and to be astounded by the occasional flash of wisdom and insight.
“The unexamined life is not worth living”, Socrates allegedly said. I examine it first by writing it down—as I am doing now, sitting outside a village café, the sun shining on the white walls and burgundy trim of the house across the lane, while the emerald green tiles of the wall against which I lean are cool, situated as we are in the shade. An elderly couple gets into their truck and head off into Saturday afternoon while two young men listen to Portuguese and French pop music, gossiping about the villagers and fighting on the phone with their girlfriends. I am waiting for a phone call from a friend in the United States (we have important things to discuss—the things I have been confiding in my journal) and eavesdropping and reflecting on what I read in the journals from the last two years that I have recently reread—which is the second way I examine life. A year from now I will flip through this notebook and the journal I am keeping—a year from now I will revisit myself here, in Arruda dos Pisōes and the Silver Coast, and this time when so much seems to be happening and I am doing my best to capture it, what it was—what it is—to be here at this crossroads, waiting for a phone call while the breeze comes in, blessedly cool, and I can look with kind eyes on the person I have been—the person that I am—and the life that I am living.