Two Days in Tallinn, An Unfortunate Marriage, and Time's Slippery Arrow
On Packing the Notebooks Instead of the Shoes
When I travel, I always carry a notebook. It’s usually a paperback Moleskine, small and lightweight enough to slip into a purse. I have stacks of notebooks around the house, in cabinets and drawers, on bookshelves and bedside tables, where I’ve recorded impressions of various trips over the last thirty years. Aside from travel, I don’t journal, probably for the same reason Grace Paley didn’t. “I can't even keep a journal,” Paley told The Washington Post in 1985. “I'm always losing the book. I have no discipline."
Nor do I. Though I always have the best intentions of keeping the notebooks organized by date, I’ll start a notebook then lose it, find it a few years later when embarking on another trip. For this reason, a trip to Beijing in 1997 might live in a notebook next to a trip to Argentina in 2003, which might live next to a trip to Iceland in 2018.
Different ink, the same rapid handwriting, in various stages of illegibility. A word often begins with a clear consonant or vowel or two, then devolves into something resembling not so much a series of letters as a bumpy line, undulating toward some indiscernible meaning. Reading my own notebooks requires an act of decoding, sometimes an act of translation regarding the intentions of a younger self: what did I mean to say about hitchhiking up a mountain in the rain in Jesenice, Slovenia in 1995? Did I originally describe the razor blade pendant the reluctant driver wore as odd or old? Did I find the shepherd who stood silently staring at us in a field friendly or freezing?
Stumbling upon one of these journals, with one decade crashing into the next, provokes a sense of time travel but also a sense of melancholy: it all went so fast. It is all going so fast. Fifteen years from now (if all goes well) I’ll pick up a notebook from the year 2022. I’ll flip through it, my memory jogged by the mention of a particular hotel or a particular meal, and I’ll be able to picture that meal, that day, my husband and son on that day, walking down a particular street or on a particular beach—in the same way I flip through my notebooks now, my mind filling with scenes from an earlier life.