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One Journal's Life is Audrey Borenstein's meditation—addressed to her journal—on journal writing. As she quotes specific passages from her various notebooks, she acknowledges and honors the many lives her journal has lived. We are taken into those lives as she reflects.
Her journal has been a resource for her writing projects, as well as a place to learn patience and document her different voices. She has written in her journal as consolation, and as if it could redeem her.
Over time, her journal became the keeper of secrets, a “chronicle of changes”. She wrote to her journal, “you are lodgings for what has no elsewhere place.”
Her journal has been like a library—texts written by different selves. It has been her companion and her dance-partner. But it has also been her shadow, a tidal wave, and she has had thoughts of burning it.
By the end of her meditation, she realizes that her journal is not a sideline to her writing life, but has become the harvest for her. She concludes, “I thought for years, decades, that I was your keeper. Now I begin to understand that you have become mine.”
“In One Journal's Life: A Meditation on Journal-Keeping, Audrey Borenstein has gifted us with a literary gem unique in the genre. What began as an exercise in recording daily life soon developed into the creation of another Being, over the years an 'old compañero' with many roles: listener, consort, keeper of the Dark and the Light, examiner, library, liberator, treasure and even enemy, as the affair with this offspring consumed more and more of the author's time and energies. How the reader wishes that a stockpile of works like this journal—even if not written in Borenstein's deeply insightful, lyrical prose—were here for us to explore the lives of those who went before! And how this piece makes the reader wish she had also had the talent and discipline so to document her own passage!”
—Phyllis Craft Crawford, historic interpreter at Bevier House in Marbletown, New York, Headquarters of the Ulster County Historical Society
“In this exquisite work, Audrey Borenstein reveals an intense inner glow as she records the surface aspects of daily life. With a poet's openness to present experience, and keen awareness of its quick passage, she probes each precious moment for transcendent meaning, and communicates more than a hint of the numinous.
“Audrey Borenstein is a compassionate artist, whose human warmth and deep insight illuminate this record. She addresses her Journal as an intimate and trustworthy friend with whom she is sharing her rich resources of mind and spirit. Her voice gives authentic life to these pages.”
—Gordon Epperson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona and author of The Musical Symbol and other works on the theory and practice of the arts
“One Journal's Life is a journey into mind, as Freud considered it, where the world lives in its many representations. There many selves contend in a nodal arena to dominate a passionate reality in which time swings hither and anon towards an afterlife.”
—Samuel Z. Klausner, Professor Emeritus at The University of Pennsylvania
“Out of the many selves that emerge from her journals Audrey Borenstein has traced the patterns of her life. The journal—a second person, faithful companion and carrier of the 'burdens' of her heart and soul—accompanies her through the ebb and flow of time. In her continuous search for wisdom and through a heightened awareness of life's spiritual values, Borenstein discovers that 'it is moral distance' that defines 'the designs of the past.'”
—Darcy Gottlieb, poet, writer, teacher of workshops in journal writing as a creative experience, and journal keeper for nearly fifty years
“In her brief One Journal's Life: A Meditation on Journal-Keeping, Audrey Borenstein has created a rich and fascinating essai. Central, of course, is the Journal itself—how it began, how it grew, how it waxed and waned, how it became her old Compañero, with whom she chatted, argued, joked. The Journal brings back key moments from the past—her beloved everyday life; her changing ideas, beliefs, and feelings; her creative drive, then the fear that the Journal is taking precious time from the literature; and, finally, her fear that the Journal in time to come might embarrass or sadden those she loves. This complex material is tightly organized and hauntingly expressed. It is in every way deeply rewarding.
“As an artist and a social scientist, Audrey Borenstein endured much inner conflict. Her hope is that somehow, in the Journal, she has brought these two sides together, the sociologist having become a cultural historian. She dreams of a descendant 'with a passion for literature and the sensibility of a cultural historian.' This 'Meditation' was obviously produced by such a person.”
—A.V. Goyne, Professor Emeritus of English at The University of Texas at Arlington
“The Bible often tells a story twice, or even three or four times, every telling different from the others. We are given multiple perspectives upon the world, or perhaps many worlds are being brought together. Audrey Borenstein's journals, themselves deeply influenced by the Bible, similarly speak with multiple voices, weaving a literary tapestry of many worlds. In One Journal's Life, Borenstein addresses her journal as if a living spirit, and reveals to us layer upon layer, realm upon realm of awareness, experience and reflection. It is not easy to leap into the language of the Bible, for one needs to acquire an ear for it. This is also true of Audrey Borenstein's meditation—the reader may at first feel astray within its depths. Soon, however, the ear is attuned and the rewards are forthcoming: penetrating insights, keen and poignant observations, an ever-poetic use of language.”
—Rabbi William M. Strongin, The Jewish Congregation of New Paltz, a Reconstructionist Synagogue
“One Journal's Life is extraordinary. Many people talk to their diaries, but never before have I come across a diary which is able, in illusion at any rate, to answer back!”
—Christopher Handley, English Bookseller, specializing in printed diaries
“‘If I burned you,’ Audrey Borenstein wrote in her journal, ‘what a marvelous display of fireworks you would make…dazzling…as the soul-sparks in your pages.’ This fantasy of destruction, it turns out, was no momentary lapse. For at the end of her lyrical, poignant, funny, complex, clear-eyed, troubling, and consoling meditation on journal-keeping, we hear this passionate and insightful writer ponder further on the possibilities of finishing off her affair with her collection of notebooks full of ideas, beliefs, and feelings—of putting an end, a violent end, to ‘old compañero.’
“All the time and energy and creative drive spent with ‘old compañero’ may have robbed Borenstein, she fears, of previous time for writing poems, stories, and novels. Even more important, she worries that ‘a loved one could be harmed by what I write here.’ Happily, there was no destruction. In One Journal's Life, Audrey Borenstein recognizes what ‘old compañero’ really is—a place for reflection, understanding, and indeed, redemption. Henry James once implied that if you had to write about an experience in order to understand it, you hadn't really had the experience. Which only proves how wrong even the old masters can be. Audrey Borenstein has not only had the experiences, but by writing about them with such sensitivity and depth, she has had them more than once, sometimes with even greater intensity and revelation the second time around. All quite fortunate for us.”
—Gerald Sorin, Distinguished University Professor of History and Jewish Studies State University of New York, New Paltz, New York
“One Journal's Life is at once an unflinching revelation of personality and a sustained meditation on the writer's craft. Audrey Borenstein's prose renders both themes in graceful fashion; its audacious style actually resembles a prose-poem.
“Journal-keeping as it is practiced here is a courageous enterprise. The writer talks to herself with uncompromising honesty. Erich Heller characterized modern poetry as ‘the discovery and colonisation of inwardness’; Audrey Borenstein's inwardness is rich and allusive, signaling a perceptive, well-stocked mind. And she recognizes that the reflective self embodied in the journal comes to have a rewarding life of its own: ‘I thought for years, decades, that I was your keeper. Now I begin to understand that you have become mine.’
“Yet this is in no way a narrow self-absorption. It is a celebration of meaningful living. As she notes: ‘Portraying day-to-day life in a journal notebook honors it as a gift. The return gift is luminous with revelations.’ Hers is in some sense a prayer in praise of life and thanks for it. The ‘return’ is enriched knowledge of self and other, enhanced consciousness of what it means to be alive in this world. One might well think of the journal pages as testimony to an attentive morality. As many artists have observed, paying close attention is what the creative spirit does well. Thus the poet Conrad Aiken: ‘Let us be as conscious as possible’ and ‘Consciousness is the highest morality.’
“One of the most compelling features of One Journal's Life is its emphasis on mutability and ambiguity in the writer's unfolding history. She addresses her journal: ‘In your polyphony and provisionality you express the shape-shifting and increase of being-in-the-world as I grow older.’ On the whole she tolerates, indeed embraces the multiplicity of selves, refusing to strain for an artificial consistency. In this she confirms the idea that the artist is adept at slipping in and out of guises, that she has a range of empathic talents.”
—Robert N. Wilson, late professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina. The excerpts quoted here are from a draft of his review of One Journal's Life written prior to his death in December of 2002. The excerpts are published here with the permission of Joan Wilson.
Some writers “harvest” a memoir or autobiography from their Journal writings. But you are my harvest. There is a freshness in private writing, in letters and Journals, an immediacy close-breathing in certain passages, the shimmer of portrayals by pointillism: leave them here, that we might find them again as they are. “It is not all at once but grain by grain that one savors the past,” Proust wrote. So I wove compositions of your writings as they were, for a volume of Journal Sidelights. From your first notebook, slender as it was, I made two Cartoons for Tapestries to be Woven in Late Life. I had in mind the preliminary sketches Raphael made for the tapestries later to be woven in Belgium. As fireflies' gleams among the shadows of midsummer nights, so these swift glancings in the relentless, ceaseless onrushing flow of life those vanished years. It is only from this moral distance that their designs might be realized.
~
It was not always easy between us. On August 29, 1993, I wrote to you, “'Dear Enemy,' I thought of addressing you this morning—for so it seems to me you become in my thoughts now and again. Yet . . . your pages open before me, your voice summons me . . . to give you the accounting. Or should I say the reckoning? . . . Why is it not enough to pray, to think? Why must whatever words I have be set down here?” In January, I reproached you for the demands you make on my writing life, and asked if you realize how much more work I'd do if I didn't have this affair with you. And in February, I likened you to a great tidal wave coming up over me, about to crash down over my life.
Excerpt Copyright © 2002 by Audrey Borenstein
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Audrey Borenstein