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  3. Dear Diary, I Hate You Reflection

Dear Diary, I Hate You Reflection

游客2024-02-04  11
问题                            Dear Diary, I Hate You
                    Reflections on journals in an age of overshare.
A)I suspect that many people who don’t keep a diary worry that they ought to, and that, for some, the failure to do so is a source of incomprehensible self-hatred. What could be more worth remembering than one’s own life? Is there a good excuse for forgetting even a single day? Something like this anxiety seems to have prompted the poet Sarah Manguso to begin writing a journal, which she has kept ever since. "I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention," she tells us early in her memoir(回忆录)"Ongoingness". "Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it. "
B)The journal, first imagined as an amulet(护身符)against the passage of time, has grown to overwhelming proportions. "I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago," Manguso writes. "It’s eight hundred thousand words long. " And the memoir, a kind of meta-diary, is her attempt to question her crazy drive to maintain a record of her existence. Of all the psychological conditions to be burdened with, the crazy impulse to write is hardly the worst, and Manguso doesn’t quite succeed in eliminating the suspicion that she is a little proud of her weird habits, perhaps even exaggerating them. But she seems genuinely not proud of the diary. "There’s no reason to continue writing other than that I started writing at some point—and that, at some other point, I’ll stop," she writes. Looking back at entries fills her with embarrassment and occasionally even indifference. She reports that, after finding that she’d recorded "nothing of consequence" in 1996, she "threw the year away. "
C)In her memoir, Manguso makes the striking decision never to quote the diary itself. As she started to look through the old journals, she writes, she became convinced that it was impossible to pull the "best bits" from their context without distorting the sense of the whole-. "I decided that the only way to represent the diary in this book would be either to include the entire thing untouched—which would have required an additional eight thousand pages—or to include none of it. " The diary, she observes, is the memoir’s " dark matter" , everywhere but invisible, and the book revolves around a center that is absent.
D)Manguso, whose previous books include two other memoirs and two books of poetry, grew up outside Boston. Now in her early forties, she teaches writing in Los Angeles, at Otis College of Art and Design. But for most of the book we come away with only the roughest outline of Manguso’s life. She’s married, with a son. Her son is young: her husband is from Hawaii: she was once very ill. The individual memories she chooses to share often don’t link up to produce a continuous narrative. We get Manguso, at fourteen, looking through a telescope for a comet(彗星), failing to see it, and not caring: Manguso, in 1992, writing mostly about hating her mother: Manguso, in college, discovering that a boyfriend has read her diary: Manguso, in her late thirties, drinking tea in an attempt to trigger early labor, hoping that her husband can be present for both the birth of his son and, an ocean away, the death of his mother.
E)The memoir, rather than being a summary of the life recorded by the diary, is mostly a set of deep thoughts on the fact of the diary’s existence. The tone is matter-of-fact, and the controlled, even dull sentences seem deliberately to reject the wild, exaggerative quality of a diary. The book proceeds in rare, brief fragments, almost like prose poems. None are longer than a page, and some are just a single sentence.
F)Manguso seldom reveals any particularly sensitive information, and yet her material is, in a sense, vastly more intimate than what we usually think of as private. Her impressions, while clear, are true to the vague mental life as we experience it. "Ongoingness" is an attempt to take, as Virginia Woolf wrote, " a token of some real thing behind appearances" and " make it real by putting it into words. " It’s hard to think of a riskier way to write.
G)The great merit of the book is that it succeeds in not feeling abstract, even though it frequently avoids specificity. There is, in fact, a narrative here, although one that functions without the normal signposts(明显的线索或迹象)of life-writing. Instead, it is a narrative about the gradual shift, as Manguso gets older, in her relationship to time. It is telling that motherhood receives the most attention. "Then I became a mother," she writes. "I began to spend time differently. " She knows that this is something all parents discover—"this has all been said before"—but the consequences are nonetheless immense. "Nursing an infant creates so much lost, empty time," she writes.
H)As Manguso’s sense of time dissolves, so does her devotion to the diary. In her twenties, she wrote down her experiences constantly and in minute detail. In her thirties, the diary became more of a log: "The rhapsodies(狂想曲)of the previous decade thinned out. " As she entered her forties, "reflection disappeared almost completely. " Manguso doesn’t say that she intends to stop keeping her diary, but the subtitle of the memoir—"The End of a Diary"—implies that the habit may have outlived its usefulness. Another meaning hides, too: Why does one keep a diary at all? As she looks back on the huge project, she feels its uselessness.
I)One could argue that reading memoirs comes more naturally to us now than ever before. Our critical faculties are primed as they’ve never been. Social media annoy us daily with fragmented first-person accounts of people’s lives. But what constantly self-reporting your own life does not seem to enable a person to do—at least, not yet—is to communicate to others a private sense of what it feels like to be you. With " Ongoingness" Manguso has achieved this. In her almost illusive deep thoughts on time and what it means to preserve one’s own life, she has managed to copy an entirely interior world. She has written the memoir we didn’t realize we needed. [br] Manguso believed that it was impossible to extract the best parts of her diary from their context in a true way.
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答案 C
解析 该段指出，在嫚古索的回忆录中，她做出了惊人的决定：从不引用日记本身的话语。她写道，当她开始浏览旧日记的时候，她确信不可能将“最好的部分”从上下文中截取出来而又不歪曲整体的含义。题干中的impossible to extract the best parts of her diary from their context in a true way是原文impossible to pull the“best bits”from their context without distorting the sense of the whole的同义转述，故C)为答案。
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