Edging Toward Japan: Samuel Pepys and Sei Shonagon - the ultimate love match

From mainichi.jp/english

By Damian Flanagan

A few weeks ago, I attended a rather unusual concert in Cambridge, England. All the pieces of music dated from the time of the famous English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). My knowledge of the pop songs of the 1660s is not what it should be and I didn't have a particular strong conception of what music from this period actually sounds like.

We are talking here about going back to a time before virtually all the famous classical composers -- before Beethoven, before Mozart, even before Bach. As it turns out however, the music of the 17th century gets on perfectly well without all of them and is teeming with beautiful pieces and charming songs played to the accompaniment of the strangest of instruments.

We started off with some songs played on the spinet, a kind of early harpsichord, and then the musicians produced an extraordinary instrument called a "theorbo," which is an extravagantly oversized lute. Pepys himself loved music and probably owned the very spinet on which the songs were performed, and ordered the making of a "theorbo" which he proudly declared in his diary to be as good as any in the country. When not writing his diary or helping to run the British admiralty (his day job), he even composed songs himself. 

Of late, I've found myself getting more and more interested in Pepys and his world. Years ago, I listened to actor and director Kenneth Branagh reading extracts from the voluminous diary (which covers the years 1660-69) and recently I've been reading Claire Tomalin's prize-winning biography of Pepys, "The Unequalled Self".

What is fascinating about Pepys is partly the turbulence of the time he lived -- the nine years of the diary cover the chaos and anxiety in England following the death of Oliver Cromwell, the initially jubilant restoration of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the war against the Dutch amongst many other happenings. But amidst all these mammoth events, there is the even greater fascination of being immersed in the domestic minutiae of Pepys' daily life, sharing with him his passions and disappointments, his surreptitious affairs and ambitions, his bowel movements and flatulations, his moments of anger, grief and joy.

Tomalin recounts that Pepys was an astoundingly good diarist because for him every day of life was an adventure in human consciousness, filled with the sheer thrill of being alive, of being able to sense and enjoy everything the world had to offer -- its food, its music, its voluptuous women, its poetry, its conversation and company, its seasons and heats and frosts, and, not least, his cherished books. All these things were part of his all-consuming embrace of life that makes him a thrilling literary companion.

Samuel Pepys (Portrait by John Hayls, 1666. Public domain)

These days, if I feel like disappearing for a while into an alternate universe, then I might turn to Pepys and transport myself back into the 1660s. Yet Pepys is not the only explorer of consciousness that I have turned to of late.

On recent trips to Japan I wanted to introduce my two daughters to a writer who might capture their interest and so began listening with them to a reading (in English) of "The Pillow Book" by Sei Shonagon. As we had our breakfasts every morning in Japan, we would be transported to Sei Shonagon's world of the Imperial Court in Kyoto around the year 1,000 where Shonagon was a courtier. We would enjoy her sometimes caustic and always beautiful observations on the men and women around her, the changing colours of the mountains, the preferred etiquette of her lovers, the seasonal colours of the mountains, the sound of the flute in the night air...

I must admit that I am a fairly recent covert to Sei Shonagon. In my younger days, I had a far greater appreciation of Shonagon's contemporary and rival, Murasaki Shikibu, the author of the monumental "The Tale of Genji". Shonagon seemed to me much the inferior of the two. But rediscovering "The Pillow Book" with my daughters, I now see that Shonagon is a much more fascinating, individualistic personality than I first appreciated.

She is never less than her own woman and, like Pepys, is an admirably honest and perceptive contemplator of the sights, sounds and flavours of her own existence. Unlike Pepys, she was not keeping a day-to-day journal, but rather a compendium of observations on diverse subjects that cumulatively add up to an almost cubist portrait of a world now vastly lost in time.

                                                                    Sei Shonagon (Painting by Uemura Shoen, 1917-18. Public domain)

Sitting in an autumnal chapel in Cambridge, England, listening to the music of the 1660s, I found myself strangely thinking about Sei Shonagon and about how fundamentally similar she and Samuel Pepys were. In their professional lives, they were robust and worldly, but in their private lives they were seekers of (sometimes illicit) joy and things of beauty, candid in their assessments of themselves and others.

I was thinking that this strange linkage of Samuel Pepys and Sei Shonagon was a whimsical idea all my own, when my daughter surprised me at breakfast the next morning by suddenly saying, "Last night I dreamt of Sei Shonagon and Samuel Pepys..."

When I responded that I had been thinking about them too and that they would have made a great couple, my 14-year-old daughter recoiled in distaste at the idea. "Ugh!" And yet I'm still thinking it could have been a match made in heaven, or in hell, to put two such quick-witted, intelligent and highly opinionated minds together.

We live in a world in which, to a tiresome degree, people are compartmentalised according to their nation, their race, their gender, their sexuality. Yet sometimes, people from vastly different cultures at completely different historical periods can appear profoundly similar in their thrilling engagement with the sheer mystery of being alive. We make a mistake, I suspect, when we keep Sei Shonagon cloistered in a room called "Heian Court Literature", alongside (to her probably insufferable) companions like Murasaki Shikibu.

Pepys himself, I suspect, would have found boundless joy in the colours and beauty of the Heian court, stealing through the night-time garden of a Heian lady, intent on begging entrance for a moonlit tryst. While Sei Shonagon longs, I think, to burst into a wider world, to explore Pepys' library of Western books, to smoke a pipe and drink some wine, and sing songs of love while Samuel flirtatiously accompanies her on the theorbo.

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20250517/p2a/00m/0op/004000c

Meet Celebrated Southern Memoirist Judy Goldman

From styleblueprint.com

Judy Goldman’s new book — "The Rest of Our Lives" — invites readers to see aging as an exhilarating time for embracing a new kind of existence. Get to know this inspiring FACE of the South! 

When Judy Goldman turned 80, she felt she’d run out of things to write about. The South Carolina native had already published seven books — three memoirs, two novels, and two poetry collections. Then Judy, now 83, remembered what she often told her memoir workshop students: Write about what keeps you up at night. So, she decided to do just that.

Judy’s newest book – a memoir titled The Rest of Our Lives – tackles the topic of aging, offering readers a new and refreshing way of viewing each stage of life they enter. We caught up with Judy to learn more! 

How did you get into writing?

I started writing in the third grade. That’s the year I started keeping a diary. I wrote my first poem in the third grade, and I took it to my teacher, and the way she reacted to it, you would have thought I was headed for a Pulitzer. She went crazy over it. It was terrible. It showed no talent whatsoever. But that was the early encouragement that I had …

When I went to New York, I pursued a career in copywriting and advertising, and I did that for years. I was a copywriter for ad agencies and then freelanced, so I’ve always written. I was amazed that I could earn a living doing something I had always done and loved to do.

But when I was in my 30s, both of my parents were going through the process of dying at the same time. I was young to lose both parents. I took to my typewriter instead of taking to my bed, and I just wrote one poem after another. All I wrote about was loss. A friend who was in a poetry group with me said, “Judy, you are the high priestess of loss.”

But it got me through that period and started me on my path to being a writer. I stopped writing advertising copy and just devoted everything to writing poetry, then novels, then memoirs.

Judy Goldman is the author of eight books and is often asked to give talks on her writing. Image: Judy Goldman

Your newest memoir is about aging. How did that come about?

Usually, after I publish a book, I have an idea for a new book, and I’m ready to move on. But after my last book was published, I had no idea what to write about. I told my husband, “That’s my last book. I’m not going to ever write another book.” And he said, “You always say that.” I find that very annoying, because it’s so true. But part of thinking that was my last book was thinking, I’m too old to write. That’s what was happening to me.

We’re never too old to write. If we’re worrying about something, if we’re trying to figure out, “how am I going to get along or conquer the challenges of this stage — and there are challenges at every stage, not just old age; there are challenge at 15, 21, 35, 83 — we just have to decide it’s a place full of possibilities.

What encouragement would you give to a woman who wants to start writing or doing something new, but feels too old?

We have to understand that the details of our lives matter. Write about the details of your life—whether in poetry, memoir (both of those are very personal), or fiction—and use the details of your life when you’re creating your characters. Really understanding that the details of our lives matter is important, no matter what we’re trying to tackle next.

What impact does memoir writing have on your everyday life?

In general, I think the biggest effect writing has on my life, particularly writing memoirs, is that it makes me notice things more. I take in more, and I think it’s really good for us to be aware of what is around us. Many times, people ask me if writing a memoir is cathartic. I’m not sure it is, because it’s not writing in a diary — although maybe the initial impulse is the same.

What happens in a memoir is you’re trying to turn your own experiences or memories into art, into something that might matter to somebody else. And that’s very different from writing in a journal.

Judy Goldman’s eighth book and fourth memoir, The Rest of Our Lives, invites readers to reconsider their views of aging. Goldman says the book could be a guide for 80-year-olds and 40-year-olds and everyone in between. Image: Judy Goldman

Does writing a memoir feel different from writing poetry or fiction?

Writing poetry and writing a memoir feel very similar to me because they both use the language of feeling. They’re both intimate. They’re both like a fireside chat with the reader. As for writing fiction, I published two novels that should never have been published. I know that’s a terrible thing to say in an interview, but I was not very good at making things up. I would rather write out of the experiences of my life.

What do you wish more people understood about aging?

If we bother to imagine what old age is like when we’re young, we tend to think it’s something foreign or alien. Really, old age just echoes all the other stages we’ve passed through on our way from then to now. And each stage brings with it the fear of the unfamiliar, along with the exhilaration of trying out a new kind of existence.

What writers inspire you?

Usually, it’s just whoever I’m reading. I don’t read books for pleasure anymore. I read books to learn. I started writing fiction and memoirs so late. My first novel was published when I was 58, so I feel like I have so much to learn. If a book doesn’t have something to teach me about writing, I close the book. My current favorite is Claire Keegan. Her books are jewels. My favorite of hers is Small Things Like These.

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When she’s not working, Judy enjoys spending time with her children, grandchildren, and her husband, Henry. We’ve been married for 57 years! I always wanted a really good love story, and Henry and I got a really good love story. We decided to get married during our third date, “she says. “I had been engaged to another guy and broke my engagement three weeks before the wedding, so I knew what I was looking for. And when I met Henry, I thought, this is it. And he thought the same thing. Image: Judy Goldman

What do you like to do when you’re not working?

I like to walk. I like to be with my family. My daughter lives 10 minutes away, and my son lives eight minutes away.

What’s the best advice you have to offer?

It’s a quote from the poet Nikki Giovanni: “I recommend old age,” she said. “There’s just nothing as wonderful as knowing you have done your job.”

Aside from faith, family, and friends, name three things can’t you live without.

My new vegetable peeler, the photographs of family and friends I have all around my house, and cutting azalea blooms from other people’s yards, and putting them in my condo.

https://styleblueprint.com/everyday/southern-author-judy-goldman/

"I risked jail by writing illegal WW2 diary - now at 99 I want to share secrets"

From thesun.co.uk/news

FORCES fighting in World War Two knew the rules: Anyone who kept a diary risked being be jailed.

But now, at the age of 99½, ex-Royal Marine Tom Hill has finally decided to reveal his secret wartime journal.

Father-of-two Tom showed The Sun the tiny booklet that he has kept hidden for 80 years.

It records the horrors and hilarity of war.

As the anniversary of VE Day — when war ended in Europe — approaches, Tom says: “I knew if I was caught with it I’d have ended up in jail.

“But I went to so many places and I knew if I didn’t write them all down I’d forget where I’d been.

“I kept it hidden with my medical kit in a front leg pocket. Thankfully, the medical kit wasn’t ever inspected so I got away with it.”

But what a tale the notebook, only slightly bigger than a credit card, has to tell.

It goes from the beaches of Normandy, where Tom spent 16 days under fire before his landing craft was sunk, to the Far East and Australia. 

                                                                                       Tom serving in Australia in 1944

                                                                                                   Credit: Paul Tonge

He was in the Panama Canal when VE Day was declared on May 8, 1945. His delighted last entry on May 30 says simply: “UK — Here I come!”

Despite working as a tool setter — a protected job that meant he would never have to fight — Tom volunteered to join the Royal Marines, the only regiment that would take 17-year-olds, and he became a landing craft Coxswain.

I went to so many places and knew if I didn’t write them down I’d forget. I hid the diary in my medical kit and thankfully I got away with it         Tom

At his home in Birmingham, he says: “I wanted to do my bit for my country, especially after witnessing Coventry Road being bombed and seeing first-hand how we were being targeted by the Germans.”

                                          At the age of 99½, ex-Royal Marine Tom Hill has finally decided to reveal his secret wartime journal

                                                                                                       Credit: Paul Tonge

Here, he reflects on some of the entries from his first-hand account of history . . . 

JUNE 1943: After six weeks training in Portsmouth, Tom travels to Scotland to join the former merchant ship Empire Battleaxe, which was home to 90 marines.

JUNE 4, 1944: Back in Portsmouth, Tom ferries troops out to the Battleaxe at anchor in the Solent.

He says: “We didn’t know of the plan for the D-Day landings in France.

“The first we knew of it was seeing troops playing with foreign money on board the ship. We hadn’t been told a thing!”

JUNE 6, 1944: After being held back 24 hours due to bad weather, Tom arrives off Normandy.

He was in the four-man crew of an LCA landing craft, navigating eight miles through choppy waters, taking 35 troops at a time across from the ship to Sword Beach.

He says: “The sights we saw going back and forth were terrible, just awful, ships being sunk and injured troops in the water, but we had to keep going.

“Shells were going over our heads, troops were being shot at. By night all hell seemed to break loose and we were in the crossfire.

“Either side of us I could see LCAs with their doors blown off. The sergeant on another LCA signalled to me that he had one engine and couldn’t fire the other.

“He asked me to move around and take a look.

“I could see a body of one of our troops was wrapped round the propeller shaft rendering it unusable.”

For 16 days Tom and his crew ferried in hundreds of troops and supplies to the beaches before being used to deliver mail.

On one mail run they came across a ship where a shell had gone through a hatch, killing every soldier onboard.

Tom recalls: “There were two lads sharing a flagon of rum while they filled bags with body parts from down below.”

JUNE 22, 1944: On day 16, the landing craft is hit by a storm and sunk.

Tom says: “We abandoned ship and swam together to the nearest boat, which was an American tugboat.

“The captain told us they were returning to the USA and asked if we wanted to go with them.

If I drank one rum I must have had two or three pints of it. I’ve never ever been drunk since then. After grot time, where we spent time with pals, I was tied in my hammock from 11 o’clock until 4 o’clock. The lads thought it was hilarious                   Tom

“While the idea of a new life far from the noise of D-Day was an attractive thought, we got aboard a British ship and were given five days survivor’s leave.”

He then rejoined HMS Battleaxe on an 11-month mission, attached to the American 7th Fleet, all over the Pacific, from Samoa to Sydney.

NOVEMBER 25, 1944: My 19th birthday, in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. A day I will never forget.

Tom says: “If I drank one rum I must have had two or three pints of it. I’ve never ever been drunk since then. After grot time, where we spent time with pals, I was tied in my hammock from 11 o’clock until 4 o’clock.

“The lads thought it was hilarious.”

Later, a prisoner of war became seriously ill and Tom had to ferry a doctor from an American ship to treat him.

He says: “I got alongside and shouted for them to throw a line down. I was greeted with the response, ‘Sorry pal, I haven’t got a pen or paper’.

“It made me really cross that I had to sit in the water for a long time waiting for a rope while we had a really sick POW.”

MARCH 19, 1945: Sydney. Tom says: “Water was always in short supply so we’d strip off and shower in the rain. We had a detachment arrive of six nurses who were all on deck when it started raining.

“A Tannoy announcement reminded us there were females on board and not to strip off and shower.

“One of the nurses piped up, ‘Don’t worry, lads. We’ve seen it all before’.

MAY 8, 1945: Panama Canal. Tom says: “VE Day didn’t matter much to me. By then, D-Day and France felt like it was far away.

“But despite the end of it all in Europe, the campaign in the Pacific and Japan was still going on.”

MAY 30, 1945: New York. UK here we come.

Tom says: “We got back into Portsmouth and were given ten days leave. Our commanding officer told us to make the most of it as afterwards we would be heading back to the Philippines. I remember feeling like it was really unfair. We’d been everywhere.”

Eighty years later, retired school caretaker Tom carries survivor’s guilt that he made it home when he watched so many others perish.

On Thursday, Tom will be attending a Royal British Legion VE Day party with dozens of World War Two veterans at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffs.

He says: “I’m one of the lucky ones, I’m still here. What I saw on D-Day and in the Pacific will always stay with me.

“So many good men I served with didn’t get to see the world in peace.

“I think of them all often and will do so again on VE Day.”

 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/34753088/royal-marine-tom-hill-ww2-diary-ve-day/

Long-lost diary returned to war reporter

From en.vietnamplus.vn

The war keepsakes not only hold historical value but also serve as evidence for post-war Vietnam-US friendship. They also embody compassion and hope for a closer future relationship between the two nations

Lam Dong (VNA) - Nghiem Sy Thai, a former war reporter of the Liberation Press Agency, has unexpectedly being reunited with a diary he lost while reporting from the fierce Binh Tri Thien battlefield, which was recently handed over by the US Embassy in Vietnam.

Thai recalled that in early April, a friend who is a former lecturer at the University of Hanoi, where he once studied unexpectedly called and asked if he had ever lost a diary during the war. His joy was immense upon learning that the long-lost diary, which recorded his student years and time as a war reporter, had been found just ahead of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the south and national reunification (April 30).

A copy of the diary of the former war reporter of the Liberation Press Agency. (Photo: VNA)

He said on May 10, 1965, after graduation, he and 12 fellow students began intensive training in preparation for supporting the southern battlefield. They underwent a three-month crash course in news writing, while Thai received an additional two months of photography training.

During the fierce days on the Binh Tri Thien battlefield, amid relentless bombings and gunfire, the war reporter kept a habit of recording everyday moments in his personal diary, while professional notes were kept in a separate notebook.

In late 1968, Thai volunteered to join the high-intensity 935 campaign in Tri Thien to gather more materials for writing and photography. Before heading to the battlefield, he asked an officer of the Logistics Department of Military Region 4 to keep his diary, saying that it would provide materials for other journalists and writers. However, when he returned, the area where the logistics base hut had been located was flattened by US bombs, and all the documents stored in metal cabinets at the Logistics Department were lost.

Thai received his diary at a ceremony for handing over war keepsakes, organised by the Steering Committee 515 of Military Region 7 in collaboration with the US Defense Attaché Office in Hanoi in HCM City on April 18.

At the event the US side returned several valuable war memorabilia during this event, including commendations, battlefield diaries, and notebooks of veterans, and martyrs.

                                       Nghiem Sy Thai, the former war reporter of the Liberation Press Agency, reads his diary. (Photo: VNA)

Thai shared emotionally that to him, this was not just a piece of memorabilia, but a fragment of memory and a part of his very flesh and blood that had come home.

He expressed his gratitude to organisations that acted as bridges of friendship between the two countries, saying that these war keepsakes not only hold historical value but also serve as evidence for post-war bilateral friendship.

They also embody compassion and hope for a closer future relationship between Vietnam and the US, he added.

https://en.vietnamplus.vn/long-lost-diary-returned-to-war-reporter-post317908.vnp 

Junk journaling: the origins and its rise in popularity today

From miamistudent.net

TikTok has a way of reinventing ideas as the “new” trend, bringing long-time practices to light, and junk journaling is no exception.

I discovered the concept of junk journaling two months ago when I looked up ‘journal’ on TikTok. I expected ASMR videos of writing journal entries to pop up, but I found creators sharing the content of the pictures, drawings, stickers, wrapping paper and more in ‘junk journals.’ 

I love scrapbooking, so what struck me about this practice?

TikTok is a platform that heavily focuses on creative expression, DIY content and repurposing materials. Over a year ago, Karli Predieri, a senior education major, found people doing it on TikTok and decided to make one of her own.

“Junk journaling is basically just taking, anytime you go somewhere – on a trip or something – you take little pieces. I do a lot of receipts and coasters,” Predieri said. “Whatever I’m doing, I keep stuff. It’s a way to look back on all the things I’ve done throughout the year.”

                                                                                      Photo by Josie Zimmerman | The Miami Student
                                                       Zimmerman shared some of Predieri's junk journal spreads.

Junk journaling has deep historical roots. According to Justine Jenkins, historians claim that journals and diaries existed as far back as the Middle Ages. During this period, the ability to read and write was reserved for the upper class of society.

The practice dates back to the 19th-century tradition of scrapbooking, where families recorded their lives and events through mementos. This was done to capture significant life events, such as weddings, funerals, and childbirth.

Around this time, printing companies emerged, and beautiful art and designs became more accessible in cards, postcards, and even advertisements. The invention of the camera in the 1820s only further encouraged the documentation of everyday life.

By the end of the 1800s, families were gathering and sticking their items into any book they had, including ledgers or blank books. Flash forward to the 20th century — stores committed to scrapbooking began cropping up in the 1990s and 2000s.

                                                                                   Photo by Josie Zimmerman | The Miami Student
                                                                      Zimmerman decorated the cover of her journal.

TikTok user Johannaclough described junk journaling through her junk journals in the last 10 years.

“Traditionally a book [is] made out of various papers (originating from ‘junk,’ which is where it gets its name, but can be a mix of anything you want),” the caption read.

Often when people think of journaling, they think of keeping a diary. Predieri shared what makes junk journaling unique: it uses things that would otherwise be thrown away.

“You’re taking a lot of what you have and a lot of stuff that you would typically throw away, and you’re making it into a keepsake and something to reflect on,” Predieri said. “I add pictures also, which helps me remember the event.”

Since learning about junk journaling, I have incorporated it into my own journal life by decorating my diaries, Bible and recently my first junk journal. Gathering stickers, saving cards and papers, and making use of scraps puts my body at ease.

Something about it feels freeing – there are no hard and fast rules about junk journaling. People can just paste whatever they want onto a piece of paper and make it pretty without perfection as the main goal.

                                                                                                                            Photo by Josie Zimmerman | The Miami Student
                                                            Zimmerman uses different scraps to put together her junk journal

So why junk journaling? Why do the TikTok girls gravitate towards the practice of immortalizing trinkets and scraps that would otherwise be thrown away?

Predieri has a love-hate relationship with today’s world transitioning everything to technology.

“I really like that junk journaling is like a tangible thing, because I have something to look back on,” Predieri said. “I love that there are digital pictures you can look back on, but there’s nothing like having something tangible in your hands that you can look at.”

Junk journaling holds the appeal of tangibility in a digital age, where most people keep their pictures on their phones and sometimes never develop them into physical frames. Social media also plays into this curated depiction of life, whereas junk journaling embraces authenticity.

Physical proof of life events feels different for Predieri compared to what is stored behind a screen.

“Especially with AI and whatnot, a lot of stuff can be edited,” Predieri said. “It doesn’t feel as personal to me when you’re doing it online…and it doesn’t feel as unique as doing it physically.” 

zimmer82@miamioh.edu 

https://www.miamistudent.net/article/2025/04/junk-journal-scrapbooking-arts-crafts-tiktok-hobby?ct=content_open&cv=cbox_featured

On keeping a record

From browndailyherald.com

By Nahye Lee

I’ve bought a journal every year since 2018. It’s been seven years, though it doesn’t feel too long ago that I was a middle schooler gripping a ballpoint and carving letters into paper for no apparent reason. I struggle to remember exactly what drove me to my first notebook, what motivated me to write about my day, how I even knew what a diary could do in the first place. 

In retrospect, it might have been Instagram/YouTube/Pinterest—pick your poison. Sunny, smiling seventh-grade me, dipping her toes in the world of intellectual internet personas, would have seen an artfully decorated notebook, neatly printed handwriting, and pretty stickers and immediately decided that keeping a diary would have to be her new personality trait. I know I nodded to myself as I picked out an airport souvenir and wrote my name very carefully on the back cover. I had a journal, and all eight letters of my name were on it. This had to mean something, so I spent the next few hours looking up YouTube videos of journal setups: smiling girls printing curved letters and penning black swirls on the blank page. 

It was important for me to write as myself. I was 12 and already thinking exclusively about the lives of others. I fancied myself an astute observer peering into windows, listening in on—and miraculously comprehending—adult dinner-table conversations. I was a quiet child, a girl with her mouth constantly shut, a girl who did not really bite her tongue but just preferred to listen. I trusted I had valuable things to say, but never believed they were interesting. It was easier to open my eyes, my ears, and simply let myself remember the words flying around me, adding salt and pepper to the story I overheard before putting it to paper. All this to say I thought I was the least important person I knew—and to some extent, this is still true—and it never registered for me that I could write something substantial about someone so inconsequential. And what would I write about? Get up, eat breakfast, go to school? Walk the dog? Do homework? At 12, I wasn’t a good writer but I’d read enough of the middle school classics to know that my life was not the kind of life you wrote about.

I’d first picked up the notebook because I wanted to be the sort of person who kept a diary, not because I’d recognized that it was important for me as a writer to reassemble bits and pieces from my life into a coherent whole. For a while, I leaned wholeheartedly into this new persona I’d devised for myself: stickers on the corners of pages, monthly and weekly spreads where I wrote down every assignment (not many) and every item on my to-do list (also not many) in meticulous, aligned handwriting. If I accidentally formed a letter I didn’t like, I’d rip out the page and start over. It’s only now that I begin to realize that even then I wasn’t really writing for myself. My first journal still had an audience in mind, and my writing became an embellished, washi tape-covered record of the kind of girl I wanted to be. 

All this neatness came to an abrupt end in 2020. By then, I had been journaling semi-consistently for two years. It wasn’t a regular activity like the notion of keeping a diary might suggest—I wasn’t writing any more than I was reminding myself of the things that I had to do. It was a glorified to-do list that gave me a sense of self-importance far beyond my 14 years—one that broke down with the rest of the world in March. When it happened, I didn’t neglect my journal. Instead, I threw myself into it as a proof of existence. Proof that the words I spoke might stay instead of dissipating into thin air, burdened by the days I spent alone in the apartment. 

I grew so tired of talking to myself that I felt I needed to talk about myself to something else. It was at this point that I split my record-keeping into two: a planner and a journal. I kept my weekly spreads, something that had become so integrated into my life that I simply couldn’t keep track of my schedule without it, and added another notebook that I rather innocuously referred to as the Thought Journal. An accurate label, maybe—I did write down my thoughts, feverishly and often while crying. I remember my pen couldn’t keep up with the accelerated accumulation of my sadness. I would press holes through the flimsy paper, gel pen ripping through the fiber and leaving black ink clustered around the exit wound. Far from the neatly printed words of my first journals, my entries would descend into the written equivalent of primordial screaming, transcribed in capital letters so huge only a few of them could fit on each page. I would journal in lieu of bashing my head against the wall. I was stuck: in the house, in my head, in the fact that I would never be able to write nearly as fast as I hoped. 

However, some good did come of my obsessive daily journaling. This was the first time I allowed myself to inhabit my own mind and hear what I had to say. I no longer treated my life as a kind of backdrop, an empty canvas across which the lives of others would be superimposed. Although it was unfortunate that I was only forced to privilege my own experience because I could no longer eavesdrop on that of others, I still learned the importance of not allowing the voices of others to take precedence over mine. In retrospect, I needed that year to write only about myself, to learn to let my words narrate the stories of others, and to understand that a real journal shouldn’t be kept for aesthetic or literary pleasure. There was nothing pretty about the temper tantrums I threw across the page, but the words that verbalized my breakdowns were still mine. That was the most important part. 

The worst of my mental claustrophobia passed with the worst of the pandemic. I became a junior in high school, which meant that things were getting serious, and some concessions would have to be made. I could no longer spend hours at my desk narrating my deep depressive state, nor could I create an elaborate layout of monthly and weekly tasks complete with stickers peppered in between the lines. Journaling seemed like the easiest thing I could sacrifice on the altar of college applications. I understood the things it had done for my mental health, but it was also unacceptably time-consuming. A fair trade, I thought. I’ll go back to journaling when I get into college, and for the time being, I’ll allow myself the luxury of a Google Calendar and a paper to-do list. 

When I look back on the last two years of my high school career, I remember remarkably little. They blur together into a mess of crying and writing essays and trying to win competitions and hating every word I typed into empty documents. There is a prolonged and effaced period of stress, punctured by what I imagine to be short moments of relief. I don’t know. I wish I could remember. 

I blame the erasure of my junior and senior year on my staunch refusal to keep a diary. I thought it was pointless at the time—I thought I had not a single minute to spare for it, and I felt like I was living the same day over and over again anyway—but I see now that it had still been essential for me to write down, at least, one thing about what had made me happy or what had made me want to drop out. That would have differentiated one day from the next, and I would have been freed from the mistaken impression that my life was just one day after another with no end in sight. Most days, I couldn’t even remember what I’d had for lunch at school when my mom asked. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but looking back it seems like a tragedy that now I struggle to recall what were actually the last moments of high school.

Regrettably, I never really returned to the method of journaling in which I wrote out in painstaking detail everything that happened to me and everything I felt about the things that happened. Getting into college didn’t magically bring my atrophied muscle of journaling back to life, and I know now that I was a fool to assume I would be less busy in college. Still, I recognize the meditative beauty in sitting quietly and going over the details of my day, picking out the best and worst parts of it to indent onto paper. At least one line a day. 15 minutes. 

Writing a journal is like the act of leaving little paper index flags between the pages of your life. Like underlining particular sentences you love and want to come back to, annotating the words that construct the world you experience. One day you will rifle through and take particular notice of the parts you highlighted. You will remember you loved this part, the way it was written, the things it meant. 

Sometimes as I write, I can feel the weight of my life press down on the pen. It leaves an imprint, small dents in the paper that would not have been there otherwise. I exist and I remember, I think. Of course I do. 

https://www.browndailyherald.com/post-magazine/article/2025/04/record-lee 

A deep dive into diaries

From varsity.co.uk/arts

Sadia Batool asks how we should read the diaries of great artists and whether or not we should read them at all 

In a practical criticism supervision on Mark O’Connell’s fourth issue of Tolka: The City of the Dead, the topic of diary writing came up. We began talking about the age at which we each took to the habit. One of my peers recalled first writing during the pandemic and imagining her work being featured in future history textbooks or archives. It is this thought that calls into question the very founding principle of the diary – the belief in its own privacy. If we’re beginning to write with publication in mind, the intimacy and freedom that distinguishes the diary as its own thing ceases to exist.

Instead, we might define the piece in terms of its commitment to the calendar. The English ‘diary’ or ‘journal,’ German ’Tagebuch,’ French ’journal intime’ and Russian ’dnevnik’ all derive from the same root word, meaning ‘day.’ Even as the addressee becomes ambiguous, the first person quotidian narrative style remains. With the exception of these qualities, it is difficult to say anything about diaries which is true for almost all of them. We realise this when we try to categorise by genre. Take its imbalances between literary and historical writing, the spontaneity of reportage and reflectiveness, selfhood and events and subjectivity and objectivity, for example. By disturbing attempts to summarise its characteristics within formalised boundaries, the diary proves to be a misfit form of writing.

Having derived from bookkeeping and the practice of daily religious self-examination, the early modern diary can be seen as an account of one’s personal economy – financial, emotional, and spiritual. In the age of the Enlightenment, Puritans and Pietists used diaries to monitor their sinful selves (and as far as the latter was concerned) to bring about an internal conversion that might lead to salvation. Romantic diarists were inspired by a new historicist sense whereas Fin de Siècle positivists used them for scientific self-observation, tracing connections between the physical and the psychological. Only in the twentieth century does the diary completely absorb itself in the modernist impulse for deliberate self-creation.

‘The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood… Therefore it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather – in many cases – offers an alternative to it’José Vieira Couto de Magalhães / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Clearly, pains are taken to produce pieces for historical testimony, self-fashioning, and self-improvement. The first of these motives gives the mundane tasks of everyday life a new colour. In times of distress, victims have sought to log incidents to fully understand their effects and make sense of what’s happened. In both cases, diarists write with the intention to publish for posterity. Only if the latter is primarily concerned with survival, there is little reason for their being inauthentic. Calamities strip individuals of their identity so their writing becomes at once, historical testimony, and a means of self-construction.

Susan Sontag describes the diary as that which enables her to express herself more openly than to any person:

“The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood… Therefore it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather – in many cases – offers an alternative to it.”

This alternative is what appealed to Virginia Woolf, who began diary writing at fifteen all the way up to her death at 59. Right before her suicide, she left a note asking her husband to destroy all her papers. Instead, he sorted and saved a vast mass of materials, including manuscripts, essays, and most pertinently, diaries. The many mean and offensive remarks made the publisher at Granta declare that the “language used and views expressed in the diary… are those of the respective authors in their time.” If her diary was never intended for reading, her thoughts were never supposed to be criticised. As such, we cannot police her thoughts without being wrong ourselves.

W.H. Auden is also among supporters of the diary for the sake of disciplining “laziness and lack of observation.” This concern is the reason Tolstoy kept a diary from age eighteen to 82. His early diaries tried to develop a narrative template that would create an ordered account of his time. Each evening, he made an account of how today measured against the plan for tomorrow made yesterday. Their never matching left him in search of himself. The old Tolstoy however, attempted to transgress the confines of the temporal order imposed by the first person narrative form. Plath too began keeping a diary at the age of 11. Six years before her suicide, she captures its role:

“Just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s (no less! – – – and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her – – – from reading Mrs. Dalloway for Mr. Crockett.”

What might’ve been dull to Woolf is vibrant to Plath. Woolf’s diary is just as consolatory as her own and proves to be more than the mere ‘warm up’ she deemed it. What was once a superfluous feminine pastime has proven worthwhile – taking new form entirely.

https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/29345