Number of words: 735<\/p>\n\n\n\n
J.M Barrie once wrote that the \u201clife 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.\u201d 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\u2019ve just shown you and, if I\u2019m 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 \u201cmillion\u201d things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I live a pretty quite life. I\u2019ve spent a lot of what I hope is the less than half of it that\u2019s passed reading and teaching books, and one thing I\u2019ve 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\u2019s art. My own diaries have outgrown the green strongbox I used to keep them in, and I\u2019ve outgrown believing I\u2019m such a shocking character that they need to be locked up. They\u2019re a permanent part of life now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m always behind. I try to write each night, but I often dont\u2019t get around to writing up day until several more have gone by. But I managed to keep the mall separate. It\u2019s gone on this way for seven years now without any day missing its sentences. I suppose it\u2019s a compulsion, but I hesitate to call it that, because it\u2019s gotten pretty easy. There comes a point when, like a marathon runner, you get through some sort of \u201cwall\u201d and start running on automatic. Of course, there are days when I hate writing the thing. If you\u2019ve 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\u2019ll ask myself; but I\u2019ll do it anyway. I\u2019ve been grateful for uneventful days, because I\u2019ve 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\u2019ll start writing and go on for pages, a single sound or sight recalled from the afternoon suddenly loosing a chain of thoughts. I\u2019ve learned, in fact, that nothing never happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can recall a few times when during the day I\u2019ve decided not to do something because I realized that if I did it I\u2019d have to mention it to do dairy the night. This may be the result of a Catholic unbringing \u2013 during which confession was a deterrent to sin, not just its antidote \u2013 or it may just be an excuse I occassionaly give myself to be better than I am. I know what I\u2019ve often anticipated small disasters \u2013 in love, at work \u2013 in the diary, and written that if the bad thing I have in mind happens it really won\u2019t 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\u2019ve sometimes hesitated to hope for them in the diary because the gods can hear and mustn\u2019t be tempted. This too, is a practice I ought to abandon; the evidence is by now convincing that the gods don\u2019t read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Keeping the diary is not a practice that universally endears one to one\u2019s friends. Some would prefer that their friendship be \u201coff the record,\u201d 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\u2019s camera will steal his spirit. I don\u2019t\u00a0 blame them. The little reading I\u2019ve done of my own thirty books convices me I\u2019m a lousy judge of character in the early stages of acquaintance. Not so bad as time goes on and impressions accrue \u2013 but what a lot of paeans to jerks and brickbats to bricks those books contain!<\/p>\n\n\n\n