"Out of the dust, immortality"

By Tim Holman

After a 40-year delay, I recently published my student diary. Since then I've been pondering some very basic questions, such as:-

What is a diary?
What is it not?
Why bother?
Is anybody else interested?

To start at the beginning, a diary is a very private thing - or should be. It is written by someone for their private thoughts or amusement, or to log all the worries that plague them in the hope that the best form of remedial action will become clear. It certainly helps if the person has an urge to write and can't stop jotting things down.

OK, fine, but in that case why have I now published a portion of my own diary? Am I not guilty of double standards? No, not really. Unknown to anyone else, it was written in complete privacy and it's taken me 40 years to reveal its existence. I had only 2 motives when deciding to publish it:

1 To give my old college, Trinity at Oxford, something for their archive, so that in 100 or 200 years' time someone might find it and be interested in my tales of student life in the late 1970s;
2  To go to my grave as a published author! And why not?

A true diary should not be a dismal catalogue of complaints and whinges directed at particular individuals. Nor should it be written with the specific aim of being published quickly. I know that certain respectable and respected authors do precisely that, but in my opinion what they have produced isn't a diary. A better word would be journal, or possibly chronicle.

Why bother? Well, I've already mentioned an uncontrollable urge to write, but other possibilities include a wish to capture day-to-day events before they're forgotten; a passion to create something unique; a practical wish to log all of one's hobbies and interests in one place; and - perhaps - to inhabit somewhere comforting when one is alone. I'll return to that last theme in a future post.

Is anybody else interested? Answer: no idea. This is something that the diarist can't control and shouldn't really care about.

In 1984 the "Times" published an article by Sir Roy Strong which discussed some of these issues. I've attached it here. (By the way, Pepys didn't really look like that.) Sir Roy was disdainful of "diaries" that are written specifically to settle old scores, but stressed their importance as a means of recording for posterity the little details of everyday life. "...The account of clothes, places, events, food and customs become hypnotic ... (a) mirror of daily life and character, and the cycle of the seasons."

Quite so. Without really thinking about it, that's why I jotted things down 40 years ago and still do today. And note that I just used the word "jotted", which for me means writing things down on paper. Of course we can all record our thoughts and keep diaries on blogs and websites, but how long will they last? That is also an issue for me to return to soon.