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Manguso - Ongoingness : the end of a diary

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Manguso Ongoingness : the end of a diary
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Ongoingness : the end of a diary: summary, description and annotation

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The author traces the documentation of her own life in diaries over twenty-five years, exploring the struggle to find clarity in life.

In her third book that continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay, Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened, she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary--it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity amid the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us--Publishers website. Read more...
Abstract: The author traces the documentation of her own life in diaries over twenty-five years, exploring the struggle to find clarity in life.

In her third book that continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay, Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened, she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary--it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity amid the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us--Publishers website

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Advance Praise for Ongoingness

After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about timeabout mortality. I cant think of a writer who is at once so experimentally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it.

Miranda July

The memoir form is shaken up and reinvented in this brilliant meditation on time and record-keeping. Ongoingness is a short book but theres nothing small about it. Sarah Manguso covers vast territory with immense subtlety and enviable wit.

Jenny Offill

Sarah Mangusos personal meditation on time and memory begins at the center of a dilemma: how to let time go by without losing the life it contains. Ongoingness is a diary turned inside out, an answer to the writers question, what do I do with all the words of my life. Its a quiet argument for letting go and going on.

Lewis Hyde

It seemed scarcely possible that, after The Two Kinds of Decay and The Guardians , Sarah Mangusos work could get more urgent, but somehow it has. Ongoingness confronts the deepest processes and myths of life and death: birth, marriage, illness, mourning, motherhood, art. Underwriting this book, as is true of all of Mangusos books, is writing itself. Or, rather, the writing is about itself in the best, most vital sense. Our author/narrator/speaker/heroine is never not asking the most fundamental question, namely, Why live? The seriousness of the inquiry gives this book extraordinary purpose, momentum, and value. I am in awe.

David Shields

Ongoingness

Also by Sarah Manguso The Guardians The Two Kinds of Decay Hard to Admit - photo 1

Also by Sarah Manguso

The Guardians

The Two Kinds of Decay

Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape

Siste Viator

The Captain Lands in Paradise

Ongoingness

the end of a diary

Sarah Manguso

Graywolf Press

Copyright 2015 by Sarah Manguso

The quoted lines on are excerpted from When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats.

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press 250 Third Avenue North Suite 600 Minneapolis - photo 2

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-55597-703-0

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-336-0

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2015

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014950981

Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

For Adam

Ongoingness

I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago. Its eight hundred thousand words long.

I didnt want to lose anything. That was my main problem. I couldnt face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.

I wrote about myself so I wouldnt become paralyzed by ruminationso I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it.

More than that, I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasnt enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing Id missed it.

Imagining life without the diary, even one week without it, spurred a panic that I might as well be dead.

The trouble was that I failed to record so much.

Id write about a few moments, but the surrounding timethere was so much of it! So much apparent nothing I ignored, that I treated as empty time between the memorable moments.

Despite my continuous effortin public, in private, in the middle of the night, and in moving vehiclesI knew I couldnt replicate my whole life in language. I knew that most of it would follow my body into oblivion.

From the beginning, I knew the diary wasnt working, but I couldnt stop writing. I couldnt think of any other way to avoid getting lost in time.

I tried to record each moment, but time isnt made of moments; it contains moments. There is more to it than moments.

So I tried to pay close attention to what seemed like empty time. I made my writing students sit silently for twenty, thirty, forty minutes. Then we all wrote about the almost nothing that had happened. I was always running between the classroom and the photocopier so we could read, right away, about the almost nothing that had just happened.

I wanted to comprehend my own position in time so I could use my evolving self as completely and as usefully as possible. I didnt want to go lurching around, half-awake, unaware of the work I owed the world, work I didnt want to live without doing.

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.

A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.

Why do people keep diaries? Prisoners, explorers, regentsof course. But there are so many others, nobly addressing the entire future.

I was one of the others, but I wasnt writing to anyone.

Inside the cover of one notebook I copied some lines of poetry as a love letter to my future self:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep ,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book ,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

Hypergraphia , the overwhelming urge to write. Graphomania , the obsessive impulse to write. Look up the famous cases if youre interested. Nothing about them ever helped me with my problem.

Like many girls I was given a diary. The book bore pictures of teddy bears on every page. I wrote in it every now and then out of a sense of duty.

When I was nine I brought the diary to the beach where I went with my parents every summer. My mother reminded me to write in it each night. I didnt enjoy the task and remember her dictating lines like In the old town center, the shops keep their doors open for all to see.

I didnt need a diary then. I wasnt yet aware of how much I was forgetting.

I meet people who consider diary keeping as virtuous as daily exercise or prayer or charity. Ive tried for years , they say. I start a diary every January. Or I dont have the discipline. They imagine I have willpower or strength of character. It would be harder for me not to write it , I try to explain. It doesnt feel like (in one friends words) a big fat piece of homework. I write the diary instead of taking exercise, performing remunerative work, or volunteering my time to the unlucky. Its a vice.

I started keeping the diary in earnest when I started finding myself in moments that were too full.

At an art opening in the late eighties, I held a plastic cup of wine and stood in front of a painting next to a friend I loved. It was all too much.

I stayed partly contained in the moment until that night, when I wrote down everything that had happened and everything I remembered thinking while it had happened and everything I thought while recording what I remembered had happened.

It wasnt the first time Id had to do that, but as I wrote about the art opening I realized my self-documentation would have to become a daily (more than daily?) practice.

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