Yesterday I went to the Concord Museum to see This Ever New Self, an exhibition of Henry David Thoreau’s journals that closes this weekend. It was inspiring to be in the same room as so many notebooks Thoreau had touched, along with a ragtag assortment of objects: for example, his desk, flute, and walking stick; the only two photographs taken of him; two pages from his herbarium; and the wooden chest in which his notebooks were stored.
Most moving, though, was the final entry in his last notebook: half a page of Thoreau’s indecipherable scrawl, then an empty page. Thoreau, the placard explains, wrote his last journal entry in November, 1861 and died six months later. The empty page that follows the final entry in Thoreau’s voluminous journals–nearly ten thousand pages written over the course of his adult life–is as stark and final as slammed door.
Journal-keeping is an indefinite endeavor, a kind of composition that defies the constraints of beginning, middle, and end. A story follows an arc, and a novel is definitively done when published, but a journal (and a journal-keeper) starts anew with each page. A journal is a compendium of loose ends, dropped narrative threads, aborted ideas, and discarded dead-ends. That is what makes Thoreau’s final journal entry so shocking. This is a story that was cut off prematurely in mid-thought. It’s the ultimate cliffhanger: the words To Be Continued abruptly replaced with The End.
Click here for more photos of Thoreau’s journals at the Concord Museum. Enjoy!
Jan 22, 2018 at 9:46 am
And so it could be for any of us, I suppose, though that’s a gloomy thought. 🙂
How cool to see Thoreau’s journals! I’d love to see that exhibit.
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Jan 22, 2018 at 9:49 am
It’s definitely a sobering thought. I knew (obviously) that Thoreau’s journal necessarily had a final entry, but actually seeing it was both stunning and sad.
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Jan 22, 2018 at 12:04 pm
What a cool exhibit to see. I really like this sentence too: “A journal is a compendium of loose ends, dropped narrative threads, aborted ideas, and discarded dead-ends.” Yes. Exactly that.
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Jan 22, 2018 at 12:12 pm
It was a remarkable exhibit, especially for anyone who also keeps a journal.
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Jan 24, 2018 at 4:08 am
i lived
i wrote a journal
i died
i never sought more
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