The Journal of Things

Upon initially reading The Grammar of Animacy I was reminded of Twitter. Not necessarily the most flattering or intuitive of comparisons, but hey, it made sense at the time. I had an account run by a program colloquially known as a “quote bot”: a simple automated program where you could drop lines of text in, smash a few buttons like a technology-illiterate dumbass, and lo and behold! Your Twitter account now tweets lines every hour (or two or three) on the dot to your liking. The bot’s log became a landfill of lines I found compelling in some sense: movies, books, online articles, essays, song lyrics. Anything moving and beautiful.

The bot itself, however, being a simpler program, had its faults. It would repeat quotations quite frequently and sometimes fail to work all together for some unknown reason. I grew tired of it like a child does of a pet when they realize that there is even a modicum of responsibility that comes with having one. I eventually shut it down, transferring the quotations by hand into a blank journal I had lying on the desk.

The journal encompassed just quotations at first, neatly formatted in technicolor script, but in due time I began finding more and more poems and short-form writing whose magic could not be confined to a line or three. These were the life-shattering pieces. Things that maybe you would want to recite to an entire Harvard Stadium full of people. Or even… they were too great for that. Things that you wanted to run home for, to bunker yourself in a locked room, to find dead silence and crushing privacy, to read and read and read until the words were imprinted on your brain, until you had devoured the text whole, instinctively stuffing the paper in your mouth and chewing roughly in an effort to know what it feels like to Eat Your Words. The kinds of pieces that formed a little island in your psyche. Those were added to the journal in their full glory, dutifully copied down word for word, indent for indent, in order to have them with all the other beautiful things.

I guess it’s obvious that I’m a collector. I like to have multitudes. I have piles of crystals in my drawers. Pairs upon pairs of earrings sparkle at me from a crowded metal tree. Glossy tubes of lipstick roll around the top shelf. Thick coffee table books and fanciful boxed children’s novel sets line my personal library. And yet the only collection of mine that is fed, watered, pruned, and nourished is the humble journal of quotations. Words are much cheaper to come by than things, I suppose, but it is primarily my accursed sentimentality that keeps it alive. I believe that someday I will look back on this journal’s inaugural pages and weep.

In a way that a diary cannot with its matter-of-fact records of day-by-day misfortunes and shortcomings and blunt statements of what has happened and how it made me feel, this journal of quotations pulls from an ocean of feelings, from countless writers and romantics. Regret splutters like blood in an open wound from crossed-out lines that I no longer was able to look at, healing resides in white-out and rewritten words. Contemplation lives in the spaces where the ink color changes ever-so-slightly, euphoria in the less decipherable sections where I have written too quickly and tacked in a crumpled sticky-note doodle of some wonderful mundanity.

Sticky notes! Oh, there are so many sticky notes. I collect those too. It’s such an unfortunate compulsion. Sticky notes line the pages with doodles of friends smiling, abstract characterizations of imagined people, Spotify links and friend-recommended media, and countless other things. They crowd the Journal with Things, no doubt straining its spine as it struggles to lay flat under the elastic closure. Not even in physicality, then, is this journal factual and unfeeling.

Its lifeblood is animacy. It moves. It is alive.