Number of words: 735

J.M Barrie once wrote that the “life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” On the whole, I think, this is a reflection appropriate to a man whose most famous creation was a boy who refused to grow up. I look back at what I’ve just shown you and, if I’m little embrassed by revealing what I thought was a private lyrical effusion, I still see someone who, while he may not have achived every dream got what he was so bitter about missing on December 21,1973. No one gets a thousand years; but if you are lucky you get twenty thousand days, and the chance to put down a “million” things.

I live a pretty quite life. I’ve spent a lot of what I hope is the less than half of it that’s passed reading and teaching books, and one thing I’ve learned is that the private fingering of ordinary experience can fill up notebooks as interestingly as musings on great event; diary-writing is the poor man’s art. My own diaries have outgrown the green strongbox I used to keep them in, and I’ve outgrown believing I’m such a shocking character that they need to be locked up. They’re a permanent part of life now.

I’m always behind. I try to write each night, but I often dont’t get around to writing up day until several more have gone by. But I managed to keep the mall separate. It’s gone on this way for seven years now without any day missing its sentences. I suppose it’s a compulsion, but I hesitate to call it that, because it’s gotten pretty easy. There comes a point when, like a marathon runner, you get through some sort of “wall” and start running on automatic. Of course, there are days when I hate writing the thing. If you’ve just lived thorugh a perfectly miserable twenty-four hours, forcing youself to write an account of them can be like purposely inducing a hangover. Who needs it? I’ll ask myself; but I’ll do it anyway. I’ve been grateful for uneventful days, because I’ve found I can be just as tired at the end of them as at the end of busy ones, when I thought nothing happened that I’ll start writing and go on for pages, a single sound or sight recalled from the afternoon suddenly loosing a chain of thoughts. I’ve learned, in fact, that nothing never happens.

I can recall a few times when during the day I’ve decided not to do something because I realized  that if I did it I’d have to mention it to do dairy the night. This may be the result of a Catholic unbringing – during which confession was a deterrent to sin, not just its antidote – or it may just be an excuse I occassionaly give myself to be better than I am. I know what I’ve often anticipated small disasters – in love, at work – in the diary, and written that if the bad thing I have in mind happens it really won’t hurt so much. This attempt to lessen pain by predicting it has, I should hasten to say, never once worked. When good things have glimmered around the  corner, I’ve sometimes hesitated to hope for them in the diary because the gods can hear and mustn’t be tempted. This too, is a practice  I ought to abandon; the evidence is by now convincing that the gods don’t read.

Keeping the diary is not a practice that universally endears one to one’s friends. Some would prefer that their friendship be “off the record,” even though they know that term rarely applies with the habitual diarist. If in a conversation they happen to remember the diary, they can become like the Indian who fears the tourist’s camera will steal his spirit. I don’t  blame them. The little reading I’ve done of my own thirty books convices me I’m a lousy judge of character in the early stages of acquaintance. Not so bad as time goes on and impressions accrue – but what a lot of paeans to jerks and brickbats to bricks those books contain!

Excerpted from page numbers XII to XIV of ‘Book of Ones Own People and Their Diaries’ by Thomas Mallon