Journal of Journals

At some point in my life I became an inadvertent collector of journals.

I have a bookshelf full of journals that are a joy to look at. Some of them are leather-bound with gilt pages. Some are soft cover ones with what appears to be art-deco travel posters on them from a more glorious age. Some of them are hard-cover, spiral-bound journals that are really easy to write in because they lay flat on a table or desk. Some are small pocket journals. Some are large table-top journals that look like they might have been designed to be engineering notebooks or accounting ledgers. Some of them were a dollar. Some of them were thirty dollars. Some of them have grid-printed graph paper for pages. Some of them have simple lines.

But they all share one thing in common. That is: they are completely blank.

There are a multitude of reasons why these journals have never been used. After all, it wasn’t my intent when I bought them for them to remain blank. I had dreams of filling them up with my adventures and my pithy, insightful observations which future generations would read and go, “Wow! What an interesting man he was!” It was my dream that my grandchildren and great-grandchildren would read them and so come to know me, though I never met them.

Unfortunately, the adventures never happened and as for my observations . . . well, let’s just say that they’re not the sort of thing that would hold anyone’s attention, let alone make them go “Wow!”

There is another reason I never wrote in them. I think it was because I didn’t want to sully them with my horrible-looking handwriting. It is similar to the excitement that a school child feels when buying his school supplies. He loves the packs of neat, bright white notebook paper. He flips joyfully through the blank, brightly covered spiral notebooks. He is filled with dreams of the wonderful reports he will be writing in them and the beautiful complex math problems he will be solving. But by the second week of school, as his sloppy handwriting, poorly phrased thoughts, and incorrect math begin to fill up the pages, the beauty and the charm of the notebook wears off.

It is the same with journals. What is more exciting than holding a well-bound leather journal in one’s hands with its thick acid-free paper and its little artistic printed flourishes at the bottom of each page? One is filled with romantic thoughts of filling the pages with profound thoughts and thrilling adventures written in a flowing, calligraphic script. But, after a week of blotching the pages with grumblings of yardwork and house repairs and savant-like observations about the weather, the thrill is gone. What is worse, the journal has now been tainted and far from thinking the journal should be displayed proudly on a bookshelf, the owner seriously considers tossing it into the recycling bin out back in the alleyway along with last week’s newspapers and the empty vinegar bottle.

I still occasionally buy a new journal, but I have stopped deluding myself. Now I just buy it because I like the way it looks. It is no more than a knick-knack or an object d’art or an example of fine craftsmanship. And just like I wouldn’t use a Tiffany vase to hold loose change or odd nuts and bolts, I’m not going to ruin those journals by writing in them.


August 7, 2010

Somewhere in Texas