Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Literature Coursework

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
Name
Institution
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
Summary
* Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary presents an excellent example of a memoir, which she uses to share both her experience and perspective on the use of diaries.
* The author provides a chronological account of how she was introduced to writing diaries during her childhood and her transition towards embracing the practice of making daily entries into her diaries.
* Sarah Manguso’s memoir, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, introduces the readers to the length of the diary and the time it has taken the author to put together the content of the diary.
* The first sentence of the diary reads, “I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago. It’s 800,000 words long,” which indicates how long it has taken Manguso to develop the habit of making entries in her diaries.
* The author goes on to provide her perspective on the importance of recording details of daily experiences.
* The fact that she did not want to lose any moment of her life or experiences of the day compelled her to make entries in her diary.
* The thought of losing any moment of her daily experiences posed a difficult challenge of memorizing the occurrence of events.
* The diaries further enhanced her ability to focus or pay attention to details of the events or occurrences marking her daily life.
* In essence, the diary formed an intimate part of her life upon which she depended for serenity as well as enhancing her ability to remember various aspects of her life.
* Sarah Manguso is, however, not convinced that her diary is effective enough to capture all her life’s moments.
* Manguso understands the essence of time and its impermanence, which encourages her to make entry of every moment she experiences in her life.
* However, the task seems impossible to accomplish as that would entail reflecting her entire life through written words.
* Sarah Manguso then goes ahead to give a chronology of her experiences with the diary starting at the age of nine and how she developed the habit into her adulthood.
* It is when she begins to understand that a lot can happen within a short time and it is important to capture or remembers such moments that she sets out to write...