Fate Of Your Pages

[Pravda]

What do you guys do with your old journals or notebooks?

 

I have this fear or leaving them behind, I mean as when I pass.. and since this could happen any moment regardless of your age of health, I find myself destroying every notebook as soon as I am finished with it.

 

I hate that so many pages I have become fond of get discarded. But I hate even more anybody reading my thoughts, however meaningless or sporadic they are.

 

[PAKMAN]

I keep all of mine. I don't really care what folks think when I'm gone. But my journals are pretty vanilla anyway, nothing too outrageous.

[amberleadavis]

I just read about someone putting together the journals of someone and wrote a biography. It was amazing.

 

I admit, I keep mine.

[Bluey]

I destroy mine, not because they're too personal but because they're like used cartridges that have no value. They're just how I feel about the day or week, any personal issues, clarifying problems, and some rants. It's mostly a brain dump so it will serve no purpose for me tomorrow or thereafter.

 

The fact that I have great difficulty deciphering my own scrawl has nothing to do with it though, of course.

Edited June 28, 2016 by Bluey

[Out0Mind]

Depends on what goes in it. Dailey journals, I keep. If anyone cares later in my life, they can look through them and try and figure out the nonsense I'm jotting down in shorthand.

 

Books I keep in my pockets day-to-day I destroy, as they may have sensitive info in them. Who knows what'll end up in there? I just figure it's stuff no one else needs to see.

[Sandy1]

Hi,

 

Perhaps my perspective is be unusual but within range:

 

The stuff I write on the job is the property of my employer, so its up to them to retain or destroy at will.

I don't keep a personal journal, but I do make it a point to correspond with friends & family every day, even if its just a one page missive. Hence other people are the custodians of my pages, and they can decide to retain what's relevant or of some importance.

> It is quite rare that I write what I hope is a 'permanent' record, usually to mark a milestone in life, and those are written with iron-gall ink on cotton rag paper.

> And like our dear amberleadavis, reading a compilation of letters to/from different authors seems to be more faceted that a journal. (Though The Daybooks of Edward Weston was a good read, which was required for my one course in photography, I thought Adam's The Negative was more relevant.)

 

Then there's the 'official' lawyer / accountant / patent agent stuff, so those records are duplicated, distributed / dispersed and retained.

 

Bye,

S1

Edited June 28, 2016 by Sandy1

[Cryptos]

Hi,

 

Perhaps my perspective is be unusual but within range:

 

The stuff I write on the job is the property of my employer, so its up to them to retain or destroy at will.

I don't keep a personal journal, but I do make it a point to correspond with friends & family every day, even if its just a one page missive. Hence other people are the custodians of my pages, and they can decide to retain what's relevant or of some importance.

> It is quite rare that I write what I hope is a 'permanent' record, usually to mark a milestone in life, and those are written with iron-gall ink on cotton rag paper.

> And like our dear amberleadavis, reading a compilation of letters to/from different authors seems to be more faceted that a journal. (Though The Daybooks of Edward Weston was a good read, which was required for my one course in photography, I though Adam's The Negative was more relevant.)

 

Then there's the 'official' lawyer / accountant / patent agent stuff, so those records are duplicated, distributed / dispersed and retained.

 

Bye,

S1

 

(Bolding, mine)

 

Presumably you also receive mail. What do you do with that? Same question for others in the thread too.

[john74]

Daily journals, I keep. They are a record of my life (the things I do, the places I go to, the people I meet, major life events, etc...) . They are not deeply personal. My journals would probably be pretty boring for others to read (1000s of pages of scribbles to sift through). But I do not keep them for other people's benefit. They are valuable to me. As long as I live, I want to keep that record. I enjoy flipping through past journals. They just make memories more vivid.

 

Brain dump / note taking journals, I throw away.

[NinthSphere]

I don't do journals. What notebooks I have contain notes from classes I've taken & associated classwork, notebooks for other work of variable relevance, pocket notebooks with things to remember that are usually increasingly irrelevant with time, & scattered stream of thought type stuff stuff when I just feel like writing something, some of which is completely nonsensical because I'm just writing in open space on otherwise disposable materials.

 

Class notes & other work I intend to keep for reference material. If someone else finds them useful, even better. Pocket notebooks I keep around (at least parts that have continued relevance). Stream of thought stuff, including a couple of notebooks will probably just be discarded when I run out of space to fill, since it tends to contain nothing of value to anyone after I'm done with it.

[PaganArcher]

Straight into the fire when I fill a journal. I fill my journals with deeply personal thoughts and feelings that I have no intention of anyone else ever reading. Things I intend others to read, I write in English. My personal journals are encoded the same way my various books of shadows and grimoires were in my teen years.

[Sandy1]

 

(Bolding, mine)

 

Presumably you also receive mail. What do you do with that? Same question for others in the thread too.

 

 

 

Hi,

 

Cheques are encashed without delay.

As a matter of personal practice I keep the vast majority of received correspondence. At first it was the proverbial shoebox which then became a trove in a fire resistant cabinet, though some reside in a bank vault. Quite a few have been scanned and those facsimiles reside in a Cloud; others are held by custodians. (As mentioned elsewhere, permanence of a record does not rest on the fulcrum of ink and paper, but of those who think it is important enough to safeguard.)

 

Sometimes there is content that I redact on the spot - while it may not mean destroying the letter, I do not hesitate to literally cut-out some bits with a single-sheet knife.

 

There is a lot of ephemera in the drawers which is probably of no value to anyone but myself - even the the author has likely forgotten about it, though it was important enough to them at the time of writing to share. I still enjoy reading a cousin's description of a morning stroll.

 

I reckon your question is worthy of a separate Topic.

 

Bye,

S1

Edited June 28, 2016 by Sandy1

[Charles Skinner]

NO, NO, NO!!!!! Don't throw them away! That is all I can say!!!!! My children will have to decide what to do with my journals! All thirty or forty large 250-300 page books! Don't throw them away!!!!!

 

C. S.

[abstract49]

I hope, although probably with little cause for hope, that at least one of my children, grandchildren, or a great grandchild yet to be realized, will be interested in my life, what I did, how I perceived the world of my time, what was going on in my relationships with said children et al. I keep my journals for this reason, as well as for my own reference from time to time, to remind me of when some event occurred, how I thought it affected me or society in general, etc.

 

I say I hope, because I really wish that I knew more about some of my ancestors' lives, how they saw their world, what they felt about events, and so forth. For example, my great-great-great-grandfather, who was born in the Azores to at least a French father (I don't know about his mother; I know his father was French, because he had a French surname); at twelve, he stowed away on an English merchantman and spent most of his life at sea, but he died in Kansas City (not even clear on which side of the state line it was, but I think KS). My life might not be so interesting, but just maybe, one of my descendants will want to know something about it.

[WaskiSquirrel]

I'll admit I'm a shredder. Lately, I see used notebooks as a carbon for composting. (In North Dakota, leaves are not as plentiful as they are where I grew up.)

 

The only notebooks I keep are the ones I use for novel writing. I'm unpublished and likely to remain that way, but if I ever do publish, I figure these notebooks may be handy either as a mine for unused ideas or in the event someone accuses me of plagiarism.

[inkstainedruth]

I do what's called a "Morning Pages" journal. It's three pages of stream of consciousness first thing in the morning. Write it, put the journal away. (It's an exercise for a creativity course called "The Artist's Way" -- in one chapter you are supposed to go back through and note any insights and breakthrough, but up till that point you *don't* re-read what you've written). I think I'm about on volume 27 or 28 at this point, and have been known to refer to it as "my daily core dump". The old ones went in a nice box from IKEA, but I don't think I can get that style of box anymore. It's very cathartic. I write down dreams if I've remember then (and sometimes even try to analyze them); I rant about stuff; I make to do lists; I write about stuff I did the day before. It's whatever comes out of my brain and out my fingers onto the page. If anyone reads them after I'm gone and don't like what I've said about them, tough. Maybe they should have behaved better when I was alive....

It's also what got me back into using fountain pens. For several years I *only* used FPs for morning pages. Then when I accidentally left the pen and the then-current volume at my brother-in-law's house, I found that writing with a BP just didn't give me the same aesthetic experience. So I went looking for a replacement pen (which was a Parker Vector) until I got the pen and journal back from CT, and in the process found my way here, and the rest was, well, sort of history.... Slightly under 4-1/2 years later I have 100+ pens and probably more ink than I'll ever use in my lifetime, and I use FPs for everything -- including morning pages....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Pravda]

I would love for a piece of me or my life to be handed down to my descendants like a couple of you mentioned.

 

The problem with a 1 journal is that while it will have the 'interesting' bits of my life, it'll also include written down all my 'silly' thoughts.

 

Don't want my grandchild read how long it took me to decide which ink I wanted to have in my 149 this week or how angry I was at the creaking of my chair! Let alone see my flower or Mickey Mouse doodles, or for how long I've been crossed at my wife for this or that lol

[sciumbasci]

Just be as impersonal and cold as possible. I write a report of my day in up to 6 lines per day.

[Ghost Plane]

I toss mine in the trash as soon as they're filled. They're more a meditative exercise for me to think things through than a documentary.

[Joe in Seattle]

Same as above, recycle.

[Greebe]

I keep mine. I really dont care what others think after I am dead. Besides I think it would be cool if down the road someone picks them up and looks into my life after I am gone.

 

Wish my brother would have kept a journal. I gave him a nice leather bound journal last year before his death. I have it now, and it is still blank. Really wish he would have written what was going on in his life that last year before his death.

 

So unless you are confessing to crimes or weird (bleep) in your journal, I say keep them. Down the road someone might really appreciate them.