The Power of Journals

In late May 1953, high up on the slopes of Mt. Everest, Ed Hillary pulled a pocket-size, three-ring notebook out of his kit and, in script slanting to the right like a climber bent into the wind, jotted down a few thoughts from earlier in the day, when he and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to stand atop the world’s highest peak:

The Summit

At 4 a.m. on the 29th of May our second two hour spell of sleeping [with] oxygen came to an end and we both stirred out of a not unpleasant state. I undid the tent entrance next to me and peered outside. The whole world around was already lighting up with early dawn and row after row of peaks were clearly outlined against the deep shadows of the sleeping valleys. It was very cold—the thermometer I had left outside read -27°C…For a moment in my still sleepy state, I indulged in the sensations of gazing over the world from our lofty perch.

Hillary lived another fifty-five years after summiting Everest, and I can’t help but wonder whether and how often he pulled out his journal and reread those lines. For all the retellings of the tale over his long and celebrated life, nothing would have returned him to that moment like revisiting those yellowing pages. The rustling of his blue anorak, the frozen rubber of the breathing apparatus, the frosted condensation on the tent…all would come rushing back, ineffably sensed, to bridge the distance of time.

In this issue, we have three stories that touch on the universal need to record: an investigated feature on how historical summit registers are disappearing from the Sierra Nevada, a sampling of sketchbooks from some of the world’s great expeditions and explorers, and a photo portfolio of a lone weatherman logging meteorological data in the Russian Far North. In these, we see the handwritten equivalent of a selfie, evidence of legendary discoveries carried home from the farthest reaches of the globe, and the collection of anonymous data in the interest of science—all through the medium of paper.

Today, though, that analog weatherman is the last of his kind, and if Ed Hillary were trying to be the first up Everest now, he’d probably be wearing a POV camera and live streaming it via satellite. We live in a digital world, digitally recorded, where it’s fair to ask whether paper still has a role. Does it really matter how you preserve the moment, so long as you preserve it?

It does to me.

Here in my office is a stack of black Moleskines dating back a couple of decades. For a long time, I was embarrassed by my journals—I felt that I wasn’t living up to the potential to turn them into objects of beauty. My handwriting was often cramped and the lines wavered and wandered. The thoughts were too often uninspired, the drawings childish. I wanted my journals to be something worth sharing, like the ones my artist mother-in-law created, which were so full of vitality that you felt you were right there in the cafe watching Paris go by.

But I’m not an artist, and who, in the heat of the moment, is a poet? My journals, to borrow Robert Falcon Scott’s words, are “rough notes,” and eventually I realized I could continue holding them to unreasonable standards or embrace their imperfection. I finally got over it during a mountain bike trip across the Dolomites, when a splash of espresso on the bottom of a demitasse cup left a ring on the page. It actually looked kind of cool, like a bike rim, and on the paper I noted: “Cortina, 2003.”

Spilling that little bit of coffee turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to my journaling. It cracked open the shell of my self-consciousness and became an invitation to bring the world inside, regardless of how it looked. After that I began smearing other coffees on the pages, then chocolates, then salsas and sauces and guacamoles. If I got cut, I dabbed a bit of the blood. I drew with abandon regardless of the outcome, I asked people I met in my travels to pen thoughts in them, too, and I pasted in ticket stubs, currency, postage stamps. Before long, the Moleskines bulged, their spines cracked, their pages crinkled.

Every one of these books traveled with me, across oceans, up mountains, on boats, inside tents, in rain and snow and fog and Saharan sandstorms. They are not copies, or scans, or files. They’re the real thing, material and tactile, and if the mud from a sloppy ride above the Arctic Circle has mostly flaked off, if the mole negro from Oaxaca only smells like paper when I scratch and sniff it, that’s okay. My journals are rough, but they carry a lot more than memories—they carry a part of life itself.