Sarah Manguso, photographed at home in Los Angeles. Photograph: Barry J. Holmes for the Observer
I read Alice Gregory‘s review of Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, by Sarah Manguso in the New Yorker a few months ago. I knew I would love this slim slip of a book, which I do.
Gregory’s review is so good—as is the one written by Maria Popova on Brainpickings—that I don’t feel the need to spend time explaining the curious nature of this book that is about writing a diary while never including a single line from that compulsively written, 800,000 word document. Manguso’s exploration is a memoir and a meditation, full of wisdom about about many things but most notably about time and how it passes through our lives.
Manguso’s sense of time and of herself shifted deeply when she had a child. “When I am with my son, I feel the bracing speed of the one-way journey that guides human experience.” She continues in this vein: “Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments—an inability to accept life as ongoing.”
After a lifetime of being fixated—I think it is fair to say obsessed—with writing down everything that was happening to her, she no longer needs the diary. Manguso arrives at this simple but beautiful place:
The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know. No more time, no more potential. The privilege of ruling things out. Finishing. Knowing I’m finished. And knowing time will go on without me.
Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.
One step more: Gregory ends her review by moving beyond the strictly personal and looking at how our lives are playing out in a 21st century world of social media, self reporting and ever morphing personal relationships:
One could argue that reading memoirs comes more naturally to us now than ever before. Our critical faculties and emotional voyeurism are primed as they’ve never been. Social media barrage us daily with fragmented first-person accounts of people’s lives. We have become finely tuned instruments of semiotic analysis, capable of decoding at a glance the false enthusiasm of friends, the connotations of geotags, the tangle of opinions that lie embedded in a single turn of phrase. Continuously providing updates on life for others can encourage a person to hone a sense of humor and check a sense of privilege. It can keep friendships alive that might otherwise fall victim to entropy. But what constantly self-reporting your own life does not seem to enable a person to do—at least, not yet—is to communicate to others a private sense of what it feels like to be you. With “Ongoingness,” Manguso has achieved this. In her almost psychedelic musings on time and what it means to preserve one’s own life, she has managed to transcribe an entirely interior world. She has written the memoir we didn’t realize we needed.
Dissatisfaction with flux of life makes sense; it is hard to accept and anxiety-provoking. I like Gregory’s comment that she is the dance. I like to think of it as being a flower, with all the connotations of blooming. Reading to add to the list.