Memories in Joan Didion's On Keeping a Notebook

As far as writing an essay on weather I agree or disagree with the author’s statement that it is a good idea to leave the past behind is rather puzzling to me because after all, if she had a hard time to remembering the past and when she jotted things down on paper, the result was that she couldn’t remember what she was doing on a day in August in a hotel bar early in the 1960’s even after reading the note to herself, makes me wonder why? Even bother.

However I do the same thing I write down little notes to myself and find them later on and have no idea what they mean, and spend a lot of time trying to decipher them. I still continue to do this, even though I may be wasting my time. But I think that unless you keep a detailed journal even day, and I am not one of those people then I guess I will have to live with it.

You see like her I think we all try to write things down to remember things. But real important things may not need to be written down because in my case I tend to remember the real bad experiences and there’s no need for me to write them down.

I know and remember the phrase “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” and those are words to live by. But for society in general I believe that it should be written down and it is and it is called history.

I don’t know who the author is but he or she has been writing it down since man first invented the wheel or a little bit after it, because we have no idea who invented the wheel. But if we remember the past we hope we won’t repeat it, or we will repeat the black plaque, the dark ages, world war 1, world war two, or how about another Hitler or another holocaust for instance, so if we write this down to remember it I hope we will be able to decipher it later and understand what we write down and use it to our advantage, unlike the author’s story about On Keeping a Notebook in which she tried to keep a dairy but was unsuccessful in her attempts to do so. So to sum it up, it is not a good idea to keep the past behind but in her case it was.