Still a shy senior in class discussions at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, I wanted to try ideas out on paper so that I could articulate them more carefully in the classroom.

Such reflection, I also hoped, would improve my writing. It did. When I had completed my doctorate dissertation on death, grief and renewal in McGuffey Readers, my advisor asked me, “Where did you learn to write so well? Was it in your journal?”

That first journal is as precious to me as anything else I own. It was a black and maroon hard-spined Standard Blank Book No. 38, 7 ½ by 9 1/3 inches. It cost $4.25. I filled its 300 lined pages with 125 pages concerning my senior year in college and 175 concerning my 14 months living and teaching in Bogota, Colombia.

The former contains entries familiar to anyone finishing college: applying to graduate school, seeking scholarships, wondering where I would be next year and evaluating my liberal arts education, mixed with frustration at sports (cross-country running) and a senior honors thesis (which I would like to burn today). On one page, I took great delight in Sadie Hawkins week, when women asked men out for dates instead of vice versa. On another page, I bemoaned the brutal murder of Benny Paret by Emile Griffith in a boxing match that I watched on television March 24, 1962. Other pages revealed the gratitude, depression, ambiguity and irony that marked my last year at college.

The latter part of the journal focuses on my time as a Grinnell Travel Service Scholar, teaching English and American culture at the Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogota. There I would discover my vocational calling: college teaching. Oh, how I loved teaching! The journal is filled with the joys and frustrations­ — the achievements and anxieties — of reading, learning, and teaching. Third-year students, 17 to 22 years old, were trying to master five languages and become translators, secretaries and transfer students to the U.S. Their names and faces are still vivid in my memory: Elsa, Flor María, Jenny, Lucy, Elvira, Ofelia, Graciela, Gloria L., Gloria M., Myriam, Elizabeth, Clara, Cecilia and Yolanda. When they graduated, I wrote letters of gratitude to each one of them. After they had graduated, I began to date three of them.

At Grinnell, I had written about dating, male-female relations, love and marriage. Now I focused on breaking the stiff professional barriers between professor and women students at the junior college. At college, I examined sermons and addresses at Herrick Chapel. Now I struggled to formulate a religious faith that was neither orthodox nor self-indulgent. And to the world of Grinnell students, I added the world of South America, especially intelligent observers who were respectful, yet wary, of the colossus to the north. Keeping a record of my life became as important as dress-rehearsing ideas.

Later on, I would refine the purposes of keeping a journal — to know who and whose I was, to watch myself change and grow, to savor the action and passion of the times, to know the deep marrow and meanings of life, to experiment with different writing styles, to maintain a scrapbook of creative writing and to transcend my own mortality. Journal entries would weave their way into poems, essays, eulogies and letters of recommendation. Angry letters would remain unsent, their passions spent.

Above all, I have tried to heed the advice of the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke who wrote, “ … try to love the questions themselves … Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Ron Dorr is a State News guest columnist and professor of rhetoric and humanities, James Madison College. Reach him at dorr@msu.edu.