Keeping Time by Sarah Manguso

Keeping Time by Sarah Manguso
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Keeping Time by Sarah Manguso
Memory refers to the human’s brain ability to store and retrieve information about past experiences. A memoir entails a historical occurrence that is written from a person’s perspective. In addition, a memorial is a structure that is established to help individuals remember about an event or person. For example, some of the prominent leaders of the United States of America (USA) such as Abraham Lincoln have a sculpture at defined locations that remind Americans about their contributions to the country. Memories are vital since they enable people to recall what happened at some point in their lives. Sarah Manguso’s “Keeping Time” from Ongoingness: The End of a Diary depicts several things about human memories, which will be addressed in this paper.
Manguso’s journal significantly relates to the word “memory.” From its definition, memory refers to the process through which people store information about their life and recall it when the need arises. However, human memory is limited, and that is the reason why individuals cannot remember everything that happens in their lives. Manguso way of recalling various things in her life was keeping a diary. For 25 years, she had written about 800,000 words. The first relationship of Manguso’s article with the word “memory” is the fear of losing critical information. The individual admits that she began keeping a diary so that she can record all her life encounters. In reality, Manguso perceived the lack of filling her diary as being dead since no memories were being stored. She used to keep a proper record of what was happening in her life. Although Manguso kept a diary and filled it every day, she was afraid that she was losing more information because many things were happening in her life. She says “the trouble was that I failed to record so much” (Manguso, 2014, p. 1). In other words, not everything that happened to her ended up in the diary. Some memorable moments that were not stored in the journal would eventually be forgotten after some time. Overall, although one can keep a record of things that happen in a person’s lifetime, it is difficult to replicate the entire life in a diary.
The writer seems skeptical about the things she used to record in a diary. That is the reason why she claims that “from the beginning, I knew the diary wasn’t working, but I couldn’t stop writing” (Manguso, 2014, p. 1). Manguso doubted her diary s...