Diary

“ This letter might be written in twenty different ways, but only one is the right way, and now I begin writing to you in the same style as I write in my own poor, dull diary. You know it is only lazy people who can bear to record the barrenness of their daily life in a diary.
Accept my warmest and most sincere congratulations, dear Jeanne, and don’t shed any more tears on my account. You have not transgressed anything, you dear child, with your refined humanity. ”

“ I shall not give the verses, but proceed to the last sentence of the diary, which is as follows: "I cannot write down all my many regrets and memories; be it for good or for evil, here I will fling away my pen." ”

“ It is a pleasure very similar to that of re-reading one's diary, only perhaps rather more mournful and intense. A diary is generally the description of real events, a chronicle of days happy or otherwise, the gray or rosy traces left by time in its flight; the notes written in youth on the margin of a piece of music are, on the contrary, fragments of the secret poems of a soul that is just breaking into bloom, the lyric effusions of our ideality as yet untouched, the story of our dreams. ”

“ The Diary Habit
For seven years I have kept my diary scrupulously, without missing a day, and now, at the beginning of a new twelvemonth, I am wondering whether I should maintain or renounce it. There are certain good habits, it would seem, as hard to break as bad ones, and if the practice of keeping a daily journal is a praiseworthy one, it derives no little of its virtue from sheer inertia. The half-filled book tempts one on; there is a pleasure in seeing the progress of the volume, leaf by leaf; like sentimental misers, we hoard our store of memories. ”

“ Even that diary he could only keep by keeping it in public, for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is, never realised. ”

“ A man’s diary is a record in youth of his sentiments, in middle age of his actions, in old age of his reflections.
John Quincy Adams. A well kept diary is one of the most interesting productions of human industry—not the least benefit of a diary is that it produces a taste for writing. ”

“ The two works are lying side by side before us; and we never turn from the Memoirs to the Diary without a sense of relief. The difference is as great as the difference between the atmosphere of a perfumer’s shop, fetid with lavender water and jasmine soap, and the air of a heath on a fine morning in May. Both works ought to be consulted by every person who wishes to be well acquainted with the history of our literature and our manners. But to read the Diary is a pleasure; to read the Memoirs will always be a task. ”

“ This ridiculous diary, as I turn it over; what folly, what complacency, and, O, what happiness! And yet I meant well—at least, I think I did. How am I to tell now? . . . . O, hours, go by, and end this. . . . I shall not stay pent within these four white walls. They seem crushing me in—stifling. . . . I must walk, move, walk about. That is the only thing to save me for an hour or so. ”

“ I begin to be afraid that I am as stupid—no; that is not a nice word to use—let me say as simple as dear Eunice. A diary means a record of the events of the day; and not one of the events of yesterday appears in my sister’s journal or in mine. Well, it is easy to set that mistake right. Our lives are so dull (but I would not say so in my father’s hearing for the world) that the record of one day will be much the same as the record of another. ”

“ Rambling Round Evelyn
Should you wish to make sure that your birthday will be celebrated three hundred years hence, your best course is undoubtedly to keep a diary. Only first be certain that you have the courage to lock your genius in a private book and the humour to gloat over a fame that will be yours only in the grave. For the good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. ”

“ A diary is useful for recording the idiosyncrasies of other people—but not one’s own.” ”

“ I keep a diary—not a regulation school girl's diary, in which one feels bound to write something every single day of the year, whether there is anything worth recording or not—but a collection of memoranda in which I take a good deal of satisfaction. ”

“ A diary is a record of one's daily occupations and experiences. It sustains the same relation to biography that chronicles or annals do to history: it furnishes the materials out of which biography is made. When the diarist is a man of prominence, as in the case of Dean [163] Swift, his journal throws an interesting light not only upon his own life but also upon the times in which he lives. It introduces us to men in the freedom and frankness of private life. When the diary is kept, not with a view to subsequent publication but merely to aid one's memory, it becomes a valuable record of facts. ”

“ Now if you really jot down the merry gossip, and make bright little pen portraits, and tell just what happens, it will not only afford you a deal of discreet amusement, but the diary you keep will reciprocate. In your older years it will keep you. ”

“ Of all the unsatisfactory stock to keep, ideas are in my experience the most unsatisfactory; equally whether they are winged, or entirely wingless ones. As for a diary—which, to be of the slightest use, ought to act as a kind of crow-boy, or goose-girl, to them, and keep them in order—on the contrary it seems merely to follow their waddlings and gyrations with the most foolish, and unnecessary submissiveness. ”

“ The homeliness of the diary, its courageously unaffected naturalness, how it carries one out of fussy complications to a long breath of relief in the fewness and permanence of things that count! And the humor of it ... sometimes deliciously unintentional like the picture of the artist finishing a fine drawing, setting the beans to soak, bathing in the bread pan, and going to bed to read a chapter of Blake, sometimes intentional and shrewd like “a banana-peel on a mountain-top tames that wilderness,” or “colds, like bad temper and loss of faith, are a malady of the city crowd” ”

“ A diary is simply a confidential talk to one's self of one's self—such is its prerogative. While, then, sending forth into publicity this Journal in its entirety, so as not to mar its integrity, need it be suggested how hard it is occasionally to lay bare the naked soul within? ”

“ DIARY. The diary which was kept by the beloved object of this memoir, and the extracts from which form the principal part of this volume, is contained in several volumes of closely-written manuscript, and, taken as a whole, is a most interesting record of mental and spiritual growth. At times it was continued with almost daily regularity, but at others, either from the pressure of occupations or from various causes, considerable intervals occur in which nothing was written. It has been the endeavor of the editor to make such selections as may preserve a faithful picture of the whole. ”

“ These diaries were a substitute to every thinking man for our newspapers, magazines, and Annual Registers; but those who imagine that these are a substitute for the scenical and dramatic life of the diary of a man of genius, like Swift, who wrote one, or even of a lively observer, who lived amidst the scenes he describes, as Horace Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, which form a regular diary, only show that they are better acquainted with the more ephemeral and equivocal labours. ”

“ The person who keeps this record is called a diarist. It is not necessary that the entries in a diary should be made each day, since every life, however full, must contain absolutely empty intervals. But it is essential that the entry should be made during the course of the day to which it refers. ”

“ Following his father's advice contained in the same letter, ‘to take a little journal of anything remarkable every day,’ he began at this time to write the diary which he continued throughout life, making his first entry on 2 Sept. ”

“ Here she paused, and began fingering the unwritten leaves of the diary, wondering if the time would ever come when they would hold the record of other engagements. Nearly a third of the pages were still blank. ”

“ The diary should therefore be accepted, and has been accepted, as essentially truthful; and the man it shows us—revealed also by a large amount of other evidence—is a cold, narrow, methodical, dogged, plodding, obstinate partisan, deeply convinced of his importance and responsibility, very wanting in humor, very wanting in ideality, very wanting in soulfulness, inclined to be sly, and quite incapable of seeing great things in a great way. ”

“ All these records have [561] their value for late readers in their honesty and minuteness. It is on such revelations that we depend for our correct conception of by-gone affairs.
A diary or a journal, then, is first of all a narrative of real events. Fiction in this form, like Defoe's "Journal of the Plague" or the diary parts of Charles Reade's "Cloister and the Hearth," is so for the sake of the verisimilitude. ”

“ Every person who turns this page over has his own little diary, in paper or ruled in his memory tablets, and in which are set down the transactions of the now dying year. Boys and men, we have our calendar, mothers and maidens. For example, in your calendar pocket-book, my good Eliza, what a sad, sad day that is—how fondly and bitterly remembered—when your boy went off to his regiment, to India, to danger, to battle perhaps. ”

“ Do you really keep a diary? I’d give anything to look at it. May I?
Cecily. Oh no. [Puts her hand over it.] You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy. ”

“ I have been slaving all day long arranging flowers and presents, and after tea mother just insisted that I should come up to my room to rest for an hour, so here I am, sitting on the very same chair on which I sat in those far-away pre-historic ages when I began this diary, a silly bit of a girl just home from school. I am not so very ancient now as years go, but I have come through some big experiences, and to-day especially I feel full of all sorts of wonderful thoughts and resolutions, because to-morrow—to-morrow, Will is coming, and we shall meet again! ”

“ Writing the type
If you wish to write a journal, you might imagine yourself sending it across the ocean to some relative or acquaintance who cares to know about the doings of you yourself, your family, your friends, your community. You may reflect your own sentiments and those of others; you may give anecdotes, eye-witness accounts, reports, hear-says, incidents, opinions, explanations, and bare facts. You may touch upon your pleasures, your joys, and even your troubles; but your vexations and regrets you would surely reserve for your diary. ”

“ The truth is, I am not living as a man who keeps a diary should live. I ought, of course, to sit down in front of this diary at eleven o’clock at night, and write down all that has occurred to me during the day. But at eleven o’clock at night, I am in the middle of a long railway journey, or have just got up, or am just going to bed for a couple of hours. We go to bed at odd moments, when we happen to come across a bed, and have a few minutes to spare. We have been to bed this afternoon, and are now having another breakfast ”

“ From this time her diary becomes less copious and interesting, partly from the comparative infrequency of remarkable acquaintances, partly from the interruptions occasioned by ill-health, but partly also from a loss of buoyancy and a comparative limitation and timidity of thought. ”

“ Delicacy shrank from seeing him compelled either to amplify a deception or blunder out a confession—he was too easy a prey; and, after all, the matter was of small moment. I returned the book to the shelf, the only definite result of its perusal being to recall my promise to keep a diary myself, and I then and there dedicated a notebook to the purpose. ”

“ Amongst those incredulous ones, though on somewhat different grounds, the diarist might have been reckoned. Diary-keeping is{244} not entirely a matter of egotism and of introspection, of fun, and of frolic, though it may appear to the non-diarist to be. What a nice innocent-looking book it seems, when its spaces are all blank, and the days they refer to are not yet born! yet such a book may come to look like a mere fragment of malicious destiny, bound in calf or calico. Holding it in his hands the would-be diarist turns the leaves over one by one with a smile. ”

“ Without claiming special merit for an original discovery, I believe I have struck what may be termed the happy medium between work and relaxation.
I do not class the keeping of this diary as work for the reason that I shall not permit it to interfere with my golf. When I feel disposed to make a note of an event, an idea or a score I shall do so, but I do not propose to be a slave to this diary.
I have just returned from a walk on the veranda. Miss Ross came to me, greatly excited. ”

“ It is needful to lay stress on these personal qualities, because they are of the very essence of the man, of the very essence of the Diary. That it should have seemed to him worth while to place on record, if only for his own perusal, so many things that most of us would give no second thought to—that is the point to be noted, as one only a little less astonishing than the diarist’s odd plainness of dealing with himself. I have said that the use of a cipher which none of your family or acquaintances can read, is in itself a premium upon veracity. ”