Having discouraged, I now wish to encourage. Many who want to keep
diaries and who ought to keep diaries do not, because they are too
diffident. They say: ‘My life is not interesting enough.’ I ask:
‘Interesting to whom? To the world in general or to themselves?’ It
is necessary only that a life should be interesting to the person who
lives that life. If you have a desire to keep a diary, it follows that
your existence is interesting to you. Otherwise obviously you would not
wish to make a record of it. The greatest diarists did not lead very
palpitating lives. Ninety-five per cent. of _Pepys’s Diary_ deals
with tiny daily happenings of the most banal sort--such happenings as
we all go through. If Pepys re-read his entries the day after he wrote
them, he must have found them somewhat tedious. Certainly he had not
the slightest notion that he was writing one of the great outstanding
books of English literature.
But diaries are the opposite of novels, in that time increases instead
of decreasing their interest. After a reasonable period every sentence
in a diary blossoms into interest, and the diarist simply cannot be
dull--any more than a great wit such as Sidney Smith could be unfunny.
If Sidney Smith asked Helen to pass him the salt, the entire table
roared with laughter because it was inexplicably so funny. If the
diarist writes in his diary, ‘I asked Helen to pass me the salt,’
within three years he will find the sentence inexplicably interesting
to himself. In thirty years his family will be inexplicably interested
to read that on a certain day he asked Helen to pass him the salt. In
three hundred years a whole nation will be reading with inexplicable
and passionate interest that centuries earlier he asked Helen to pass
him the salt, and critics will embroider theories upon both Helen
and the salt and will even earn a living by producing new annotated
editions of Helen and the salt. And if the diary turns up after three
thousand years, the entire world will hum with the inexplicable
thrilling fact that he asked Helen to pass him the salt; which
fact will be cabled round the globe as a piece of latest news; and
immediately afterwards there will be cabled round the globe the views
of expert scholars of all nationalities on the problem whether, when
he had asked Helen to pass him the salt, Helen did actually pass him
the salt, or not. Timid prospective diarists in need of encouragement
should keep this great principle in mind.
You will say:
‘But what do I care about posterity? I would not keep a diary for the
sake of posterity.’
Possibly not, but some people would. Some people, if they thought their
diaries would be read three hundred years hence, or even a hundred
years hence, would begin diaries to-morrow and persevere with them to
the day of death. Some people of course are peculiar. And I admit that
I am of your opinion. The thought of posterity leaves me stone cold.
There is only one valid reason for beginning a diary--namely, that you
find pleasure in beginning it; and only one valid reason for continuing
a diary--namely, that you find pleasure in continuing it. You may find
profit in doing so, but that is not the main point--though it is a
point. You will most positively experience pleasure in reading it after
a long interval; but that is not the main point either--though it is an
important point. A diary should find its sufficient justification in
the writing of it. If the act of writing is not its own reward, then
let the diary remain for ever unwritten.