My goddaughter and niece Jennifer today sent me a delightful read (which, by the way, I listened to while being read to me by a terribly British lady with a refined accent). The website (Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012 – 2025, a registered charity in association with Aeon America) hails from Australia. It’s called Aeon Essays. I recommend it. Amusingly however I disagree with the predominant theme of the learned writer’s analysis in the featured column. The author was writing about diaries. My hurried perception is that she (Elena Mary, a postdoctoral associate member in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford in the UK) suggested diaries fulfill the need to be productive; and, that many of them contain outlines of a manner of doing so.
As I say, I disagree with that thesis, not because what she said is wrong given the underlying data of her review; rather that people who keep a daily diary may have other objectives. Having kept (written) a diary or diaries (some personal, others work related) religiously (almost daily) since about the age of fourteen years, I feel authorized in my 7th decade to make meaningful observation concerning the intention of doing so.
I am aided in this account by my erstwhile physician (and faithful subscriber to my published productions on Substack wherein I log a copy of my daily journal writings from my website – though sometimes intentionally modified or “refined” by Artificial Intelligence through ChatGPT) who has pointedly commented that, for whatever reason, he relishes the mundane accounts of my domestic activity. This from a man who has quite literally travelled around the globe scores of times and visited both the Arctic and Antarctica.
Clearly when “keeping my diary” there is no intention to condone or qualify what I have done; instead the goal is to capture the trifling details of what has transpired – and, I suppose, to let them speak for themselves. By consolation to this apparently unimaginative purpose, I have long maintained that the true reality of life is in the simple repetitive detail, not the picturesque catalogue of one’s laudable successes.
Now, I will qualify that broad conclusion by saying I have little interest to report the vulgar detail of my existence. Nor, I project, is there any earnestness of the reader to be acquainted with matters within that exceptional scope. I accept that unfavourable social conduct, drug or alcohol addiction, familial or business arguments and lascivious exploits – and whatever else may plague one’s performance – have indeed a crude entertainment value.
But, my personal ambition in keeping a diary surrounds more a summary account of the weather and one’s health. Speaking “in code” is however not irregular. There are ways of saying things without being completely overt. Whether the reader is thereby enabled to capture those references is largely irrelevant to the primary purpose of the account (being, as it is, merely a synopsis of thought). Frequently the main text is no more important than recording the view out a window (as I did when writing at law school in Halifax, Nova Scotia while inhabiting a house either on Seymour Street nearby the law school or on Spring Garden Road overlooking a park across the street). My narrative was often little more than the look of snowfall on the sidewalk; or, as in one instance, the record of an unanticipated visit by rats which, I am pleased to advise, was happily curtailed by the professionals. Should you care to know, the secret was a plate of poisoned food (having a green almost nuclear look) which provoked such thirst that the poor creatures retired from the premises as eagerly as they had arrived; and then the hole in the ancient stone basement was plugged.