The Misanthrope's Corner.(on keeping a journal)(Column)(Brief Article)

Having at last disposed of the avalanche of newspaper clippings known as my Idea Files, I am now sorting out the stack of spiral notebooks that constitute my Journal. All writers are supposed to keep a journal and include it in our literary papers, so that's where mine is going as soon as I kill two birds with one stone and get a column out of it.

The word "journal" calls to mind small, elegant books bound in hand- tooled Moroccan leather, not drugstore school tablets with Garfield on the cover, but that's posterity's problem. My very first spiral volume goes back so far that the faded price sticker says 39 cents. This is the one I'm tempted to toss because it's full of old chestnuts like Socrates' "The unexamined life is not worth living." I was still in the stage of writing "How true!" in margins so I come off as positively giddy throughout.

I start to sound more like me in the notebook whose cover proclaims "N.C. State University, Home of 1974 NCAA Basketball Championship" (89 cents). The first entry is about Phyllis Schlafly's A Choice, Not an Echo, in which she attacked the writer Edmund Wilson for deprecating America and living abroad. She failed to mention that a Founding Father had felt substantially the same way, so I recorded his two pertinent statements, plus a remark of my own:

"Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me."

"Am I a fool -- a romantic Quixote -- or is there a constitutional defect in the American mind?"

"No, Alex, you aren't; yes, Alex, there is."

Many of my journal notations fall into the category of miscellaneous pedantry, things I happen to come across while reading that I simply enjoy knowing. These tend to be Latin one-liners, e.g., "Scribendo disces scribere" -- one learns to write by writing -- and Gore Vidal's deliciously apt reversal of our national motto, "Ex Uno Plures": from one, many.