Daan Park in Taipei. Photo by the author

Published in the book “Keeping Time – 150 Years of Journal Writing”

Edited by Mary Azrael and Kendra Kopelke, Passager Books, 2009

"What’s Forgotten"

by William R. Stimson

Walking alone through a Taipei park, I came across what looked to be a writer’s notebook wedged in the crotch of this tree. I could only guess it had slipped out of the poet’s pocket without him noticing and someone picked it up from the path and stuck it in the tree so it wouldn’t get trampled and ruined. Would the writer remember to come back to this place to look? I didn’t even think to steal a look at someone’s private words but took this photo and e-mailed it to an American poet I knew in Taipei who used the same kind of notebook. He wrote back it wasn’t one of his. I left for Taichung the following day.

Late one evening many years ago I sat alone in my New York apartment to watch a movie I’d rented about the life of a great British writer. Midway through the story the man said to his students a few words so filled with truth and beauty that they cut me to the quick. I reached for the remoter, switched off the movie and sat there in the dark for a few sad moments. For years I'd been waking up early every morning to write in my journal but to hear such profound words from the mouth of that great man made me realize I didn’t have it in me to be a writer. I recognized how pitiful it was that I’d tried so hard at writing for so many years when I had no talent. I couldn’t imagine what had ever made me think I could do it to begin with. I got up and went to the bathroom; then came back and started the tape up again to watch the rest of the movie. Afterwards I went right to bed.

In the morning I woke and went to my desk. I wrote about the episode and my realization. Then, as was my habit after the morning writing, I went back to read the entry I’d made on the same day the previous year. Imagine my surprise to find I’d had an experience that day that had brought me to exactly the same insight the writer had expressed in the film — only in my journal entry I said it better.

Should it come as any surprise that every single one of us has inside the same greatness? Or that, like the notebook in the park, this so easily gets mislaid and then forgotten? When we are touched by the deep truth of a writer’s words, we recognize greatness. It makes us feel small. Because we’ve forgotten the greatness is our own.

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