BiblioAddict

Louis Menand wrote an interesting article (“Woke Up This Morning“) on diaries and the people who write – and read – them in the Dec. 10th issue of the New Yorker:

The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness. Most of us do wish that we were slim diarists. It’s not that we imagine that we would be happier if we kept a diary; we imagine that we would be better—that diarizing is a natural, healthy thing, a sign of vigor and purpose, a statement, about life, that we care, and that non-diarizing or, worse, failed diarizing is a confession of moral inertia, an acknowledgment, even, of the ultimate pointlessness of one’s being in the world.

I myself used to be slim diarist, long ago. Back then, I would have called myself a journalist rather than diarist. When I started keeping a diary some time around the sixth grade, the word “journal” sounded much more mature, much more sophisticated, and much less girlie than the word diary. My journals weren’t pink with sparkling hearts and fur around the edges. My journals were serious affairs with dark colors and little to no decoration on the covers. Anyone who picked it up would have thought there were serious literary considerations being written about on the pages inside. Granted, there was a bit of poetry (as I got older, mostly love poetry), but mostly it was just me going on about my secret crushes and the daily humiliations I suffered as the class nerd.

Which brings me to Menand’s interesting comments on the 3 types of people who keep diaries in the first place:

They are theories of the ego, the id, and the superego (and what is left, really?). The ego theory holds that maintaining a diary demands a level of vanity and self-importance that is simply too great for most people to sustain for long periods of time. It obliges you to believe that the stuff that happened to you is worth writing down because it happened to you…

The id theory, on the other hand, states that people use diaries to record wishes and desires that they need to keep secret, and to list failures and disappointments that they cannot admit publicly have given them pain…

And the superego theory, of course, is the theory that diaries are really written for the eyes of others. They are exercises in self-justification. When we describe the day’s events and our management of them, we have in mind a wise and benevolent reader who will someday see that we played, on the whole, and despite the best efforts of selfish and unworthy colleagues and relations, a creditable game with the hand we were dealt. If we speak frankly about our own missteps and shortcomings, it is only to gain this reader’s trust.

I’m not sure into which of these categories I fit. I suppose the closest thing would have been the third category. I did, after all, address my journal/diary as ‘Friend’ when I “spoke” to it. Journal keeping, for me, was more like conducting a one way conversation with a really good listener. It always understood and it never judged.

But Menand posits that those who fall into the third category give up keeping their diary because they “write to appease the father. [They] abandon their diaries when they realize that the task is hopeless.”

I maintained my journal/diary all the way through to my first year in college, during which I simply fell out of the habit. I never gave up on journal keeping per say. It’s just that my writing time was simply absorbed by something else – mostly sleep. Pages upon pages in the last journal I ever kept have entries that veer into the incomprehensible until they stop altogether, incomplete. After hours of studying and writing papers, I hardly had time or the energy to keep a journal too. Besides, what was there to tell?

Menand says of those in the first category who quit: This is why so many diaries are abandoned by circa January 10th: keeping this up, you quickly realize, means something worse than being insufferable to others; it means being insufferable to yourself.

And there’s a bit of truth to that as well. In those wanning days of my journal writing, I decided it would be prudent to write only on those days when something of significance happened. Otherwise, what would be the point? Reading “I went to class, got bored, fell asleep, ate, finished my required reading, typed a paper, and went to sleep,” my be boring to read, but it’s even more boring to write day after day after day.

But my new plan to write only on those significant days didn’t work out so well when I realized that all those entries of “importance” centered around boys. Meeting, dating, and liking boys was all fine and dandy, but surely there was more going on in my heart, my mind, and my life than that. This was also around the time I began reading diaries of heavyweights like those kept by Virginia Woolf. It didn’t take me long to conclude I’d never have a journal which read like that. So, I gave it up and I haven’t gone back since.

I still collect journals, though. There’s just something about those empty pages which excite me almost as much as the books with words already in them do. Buying a particularly attractive journal is an impulse I just can’t deny every once in a while. But I never write in them. I just look at them and think of what I would or could say if I actually wrote in them.

I don’t think I have the proper patience to begin keeping a journal again. Besides, I like the type of journal keeping I do now just fine. I get much more satisfaction out of posting on BiblioAddict than I ever did from keeping a faithful recording of my daily tragedies and triumphs. But I think about going back. Keeping a journal/diary is a lot taking pictures. It’s another way to capture moments which otherwise may get flushed down the toilet of our unreliable memories.