This intimate entwining of knowing and feeling
Speaking of Helen Garner, the Paris Review has a long extract from the introduction by Leslie Jamison to the US edition of the dairies published as a single volume there, called How to End a Story : Collected Diaries 1978–1998, confusingly so in Australia How to End a Story is the title of the third volume. But who cares what happens in Australia?
I am rather attached to the three separate volumes, not because I waited anxiously for the publication of each one, I’d already left Australia by the time the first was published in 2019 (The Yellow Notebook 1978-1987), or because I read them in order (I began with How to End a Story 1995–1998 before reading the second, called One Day I’ll Remember This 1987–1995, and then the first) but because I made three separate journeys in the Blue Mountains in the space of a week last year to buy each volume, the second time cursing the fact that I didn’t also buy the first volume when I got home. Although it’s hardly a punishment to travel by train to Blackheath from Lithgow on a sunny late winter morning, if there are no track works, but I was flying back to Europe the next day.
When people talk about personal narrative as a literary form, there is almost always a bias toward the insights made available by hindsight. But what can you see as you are coming down the road? “Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it,” Garner has said, inviting us to consider the possibility that there’s not necessarily a direct correlation between time passed and insight gained, as if you will necessarily “know” the most about your own life at precisely the moment just before you die. You know things as you move through experience, and sometimes the fervent immediacy of this sort of knowing actually diminishes across time. Once you know how things play out, you cannot absolutely re-create all you felt inside of them: that sensation is gone for good. Garner’s diaries are full of this intimate entwining of knowing and feeling.
“Alsof jij kan verklaren waarom ooit alles mogelijk was, maar dit de wereld is die we ervan hebben gemaakt.”
— Marian Donner
The Case of Anna H.. how i miss the clear calm voice of dr.sacks.