Sarah Manguso's Ongoingness

The central idea for the essay “ Ongoingness” is that when we are recording things with writing or with photography, we aren’t experiencing the moments. As stated by Sarah Manguso in the essay,” The trouble was that I failed to record so much. I’d write about a few moments, but the surrounding time- there was so much of it! So much apparent nothing I ignored, that I treated as empty time between the memorable moments.” Manguso was explaining how she was only focused on the beginning and the end, she wasn’t focusing on the middle, which is the actual experience. Also,“ the diary becomes ‘ a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.’ “ When we tell or write stories, we sometimes leave out important parts of the story that we don’t