Book Report: Ongoingness

7. Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015) (4/28/2020)

I have been slowly making my way through a long book on the great influenza of 1918: today I realized that I'm only halfway done. I thought, "What if I try interspersing some short books, so I feel some sense of accomplishment?" I turned to my shelf and found Sarah Manguso's Ongoingness, a very short book indeed: 95 pages. Not only that, but many pages contain only a few lines. It's like reading poetry.

In fact, it is (almost) poetry—prose poetry—and philosophy. The subjects Manguso tackles are ineffable: the passage of time, the creation of self-meaning, the slipperiness of memory. In it, she examines the need to record—she has kept a diary for over 25 years, written 800,000 words—and the way that need changes, with age, and especially now that she is a mother. Her project seems to be to make peace with the ongoingness, the relentlessness of time, and possibly with mortality itself. I flagged a few passages:

Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws.

I still needed to record the present moment before I could enter the next one, but I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn't a character flaw.

Remember the lessons of the past. Imagine the possibilities of the future. And attend to the present, the only part of time that doesn't require the use of memory.

*     *     *     *     *

My life felt full before I became a mother, but I've found that trying to say that I prefer having the baby to not having him sounds aggressive. In fact I'd felt affronted, before I was a parent, when parents told me, even in the gentlest terms, that they preferred having their children to not having them.

Maybe the trouble is that the shape of life is elastic, that it can feel and be full at variable levels of fullness. Or maybe we're poor judges of our own lives' fullness. Or maybe the concepts of emptiness and fullness are poor metaphors for happiness, if in fact happiness is what we're talking about.

*     *     *     *     *

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know. No more time, no more potential. The privilege of ruling things out. Finishing. Knowing I'm finished. And knowing time will go on without me.

Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.

Well, there's an apt segue back to the great influenza, in this time of Covid-19.