"Several months ago, I bought a Moleskine notebook as a scribble journal to
carry around town. Everyday, my brain gets filled with noise waiting to be
organized, structured, and fine-tuned. Everything I see has a perspective and
story to be told. I want to make sense of my nonsensical inner world and I want
to capture in writing the transient thoughts before they escape into the ether.
But it didn’t really happen; I guess life just got in the way. So this notebook
has stayed in my desk for months, unused and unspoiled. Last week, I opened it
up to jot down some useless information and I found it came with a
quotation:
Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black
words on a white page are the soul laid bare.
— Guy de
Maupassant
"Soul laid bare." The sense of vulnerability in those three words is beyond
grasp. Perhaps this notion can feasibly apply to a secret diary that one takes
to his grave. I just don’t know if the concept can truly translate to a blog
where everybody knows your score. Certainly not this blog, which has been more
of a creative outlet for whimsical experiences than soul baring ones…"
Image: *n*o*o*r* @ moleskinerie/FLICKR
Some rights reserved.
[Originally posted 7.22.05]
Beautifully said. It’s so tough to have the discipline to bare the soul in this manner. Sometimes I’ve managed it, but never for a prolonged period. I think a blog can never entirely substitute for such a soul-baring notebook because there’s always a public element to it, and that will always affect what one writes in it. It’s a sort of truncated form of journaling, in my mind.