Diary Writing

Considering how much I personally love writing a diary, when I came across a write up of well known writers on the creative benefits of keeping a diary, it made me want to share the wonder of it, alongside theirs:

For myself; if I have to pick one singular thing that has been constant companion through life’s ups, downs, straights, curves…  it would be my diary, which I’ve been doing right since school. It’s not as much about a journal of events, as much as it is about how you take on that journey. Your innermost thoughts, wants, anxieties, joys, and fears....... laid bare, inescapable...... because they've been given life by that pen and paper. And then the delving deep, the process of analyzing ambiguities and abstractions, and that’s where the aha moments and breakthroughs happen. Where you see that the learning curve is really not a smooth gradient, but one wrought with pains and pitfalls through the process of self discovery. But eventually, the articulation and clarity and then the strength and awareness it enables, are (to me) incomparable.

Journaling, it is said, is a practice that teaches us better than any other, the elusive art of solitude ; how to be present with our own selves, bear witness to our experience, and fully inhabit our inner lives. 

Here are a few perspectives from some of history’s most prolific practitioners of this private art.

Anaïs Nin was perhaps the most dogged diarist in recorded history — she began keeping a diary at the age of eleven and maintained the habit until her death at the age of 74, producing sixteen volumes of published journals in which she reflected on such diverse, timeless, and timely subjects as love and life, embracing the unfamiliar, the elusive nature of joy, and why emotional excess is essential for creativity. 

"It was while writing a Diary that I discovered how to capture the living moments.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

Of these the most important is naturalness and spontaneity. These elements sprung, I observed, from my freedom of selection: in the diary I only wrote of what interested me genuinely, what I felt most strongly at the moment, and I found this fervor, this enthusiasm produced a vividness which often withered in the formal work. Improvisation, free association, obedience to mood, impulse, bought forth countless images, portraits, descriptions,  symphonic experiments, from which I could dip at any time for material.

This personal relationship to all things, which is condemned as subjective, limiting, I found to be the core of individuality, personality, and originality. The idea that subjectivity is an impasse is as false as the idea that objectivity leads to a larger form of life."

Andre Gide,  the 21-year-old future Nobel laureate ponders what would become a six-decade commitment:

Whenever I get ready to write really sincere notes in this notebook, I shall have to undertake such a disentangling in my cluttered brain that, to stir up all that dust, I am waiting for a series of vast empty hours, a long old, a convalescence, during which my constantly reawakened curiosities will be at rest; during which my sole care will be to rediscover myself.

A diary is useful during conscious, intentional, and painful spiritual evolutions. Then you want to know where you stand… An intimate diary is interesting especially when it records the awakening of ideas; or the awakening of the senses at puberty; or else when you feel yourself to be dying.

Henry David Thoreau was among history’s greatest and most lyrical diarists. Thoreau considers the allure of the diary not for the writer but for the reader:

Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.

Susan Sontag writes : "Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather — in many cases — offers an alternative to it.

There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does not mean that what we do is shallow,  only, what we confess to ourselves is deep."

Sylvia Plath like Nin, began keeping a diary at the age of eleven and penned nearly ten volumes, which were posthumously edited and published. She saw her diary as a tool to “warm up” her formal writing, but perhaps the most ensnaring passage from her published journals is one of strange synchronicity as two literary legends of staggering genius and staggering tragedy meet across space and time through the pages of their diaries. In February of 1957, six years before her suicide, Plath captures the role of the diary as a lifeline for the writer with poignancy utterly harrowing in history’s hindsight:

Just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf and she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her , somehow. I love her, but her suicide, I felt I was reduplicating in that black summer of 1953. Only I couldn’t drown. I suppose I’ll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid. But I’m also so damn healthy & resilient. Only I’ve got to write. I feel sick, this week, of having written nothing lately.

Maria Papova says: Indeed, if there is one thing I’ve learned about diaries, both by having read tens of thousands of pages of artists’ and writers’ journals and by having frequently revisited my own from the distance of time, is that nothing written in a diary is to be taken as the diarist’s personal dogma. A journal is an artificially permanent record of thought and inner life, which are invariably transient. We are creatures of remarkable moodiness and mental turbulence, and what we think we believe at any given moment — those capital-T Truths we arrive at about ourselves and the world — can be profoundly different from our beliefs a decade, a year, and sometimes even a day later.

Interesting perspectives, right?

Well, I think it's akin to viewing life through a kaleidoscope, the being on one dimension and the witnessing from several more dimensions than the one.  It could actually provide the alternative in real, or if not, in the virtual; merging, so to say, the real and the ephemeral.