Ink | Pen | Paper

My girlfriend and I spent our evening watching an old film called "The Bridges of Madison County", based on a novel of the same name. It starred Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep, and was directed by Clint Eastwood. I was able to view this this film several years ago on the big screen. My GF hadn't seen it yet, and since my recollections of the film were just blurry spots in my mind, I felt it was a good time to watch it once again with her.

I won't go over the details of the movie's plot and so on. It's best that I direct you here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bri...nty_%28film%29

The main reason why I wanted to post this blog entry is quite simple--Meryl Streep's character wrote a diary/journal, meant for her children in the film, in the event that if she would pass away, her children would be able to read her journal and they would then know more about their mother, perhaps aspects of her life and personality that her children never knew about.

It struck me that, Streep's character wrote in such a tone that seemed to make her talk from the grave--as if she was speaking directly to her children, who are now grownups. It made me think and realize that, if anyone had even just a a smidgen of writing skills, it was almost compulsory for one to really keep a journal or record of things, if only to function as that sort of conduit or pipeline to talk to relatives, friends, or even your descendants (if you're blessed with any) after you've passed on. Because, whether we like it or not, we indeed will pass away one day from this world.

It made me suddenly feel the urge to write down my thoughts, then and there.

Yes, admittedly, with all the tech stuff around us, it's easy to bypass writing and perhaps keep WAV recordings of one's daily mutterings or monologues, or perhaps, as the videobloggers do, record daily "vlogs" of how one's day turned out, or a review of a book, movie, or whathaveyou. But writing is different--the readers can read your journal in a pace they would be comfortable in, and how the writer enters another person's mind via the written word is always a quite a different and interesting experience, compared to the mind's absorption of information via, say, multimedia.

I have to admit that I tend to berate and belittle other writers (by "writers" I primarily mean individuals in this day and age who, like me, have more or less comfortably adapted to using the internet as a means to share thoughts such as this one you are reading right this very moment--do take note that I'm trying desperately to avoid using the word "blog", for some reason, the word denotes a negative connotation in my head, and I can't really explain now why) who, in my point of view, seem to struggle (or maybe they're not struggling enough, which in that case, perhaps is the source of the problem) so hard to cough up decent entries or articles, only because of their "style" perhaps, the manner by which they expound their ideas and thoughts, or the sort of vocabulary basket they happen to pick their word apples from, that I tend to lose sight perhaps of why they're doing it in the first place.Maybe they made the same realization (about the need to write, just for the sake of being remembered and to let people know about a deeper you, who perhaps is not seen at a surface level, by the people around you). So now, I want to take a step back, and perhaps reflect more on reading some of these journal entries around the internet.

So I think, the effect of this would be, that I'd remind myself every once and a while, not to worry to much about how I am going to write about something, and that the more important thing is, that I have something to write about, and yes in my case I believe there are lots of things to be said. I should never make it as an excuse, that my manner or style of writing would cause undue difficulty on the part of my readers and so on--the important thing is, I have something to say, and thus I write.

I might have written this entry down primarily as a reminder to myself, but in case you find use for it, then all the better.

-RODION