The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Carl Heintze

Everyone's recording their lives in journals

Journals are a big deal these days. Colleges devote classes to them. Night school and extension classes coach you in how to write them; they are considered therapeutic by some, liberating by others and classics by still more.

So what's the difference between a diary and a journal? And are they worth keeping?

I'm not sure. Apparently, neither are a lot of other people. In general I suppose you could say diaries are intended to be read only by their writers, while journals are not. But that doesn't seem always to be true, and the difference is blurred.

For instance, The Diary of Anne Frank, one of the most famous and reprinted journals in the world, was never intended to be made public. But ultimately it was.

On the other hand, the "diaries" of Anaïs Nin run to 150 volumes. Not only were they Ms. Nin's life's work, but they were clearly intended for a mass audience, and there is some question as to what they really are. Parts of them are untrue--a real diary ought to be a face-to-face confrontation with the truth. Ms. Nin, if we can believe her, led an athletic sexual life, but she left a good bit of it out of her journals even as she invented things that never happened.

She mentions very obliquely problems with her dad, a Cuban pianist, but never tells the truth, that they had a four-month incestuous affair. But then I don't suppose one might want to confide that to anyone, including one's diary.

Another frank pitch at publication are the various journals and diaries of May Sarton, who spent most of her life in isolation in Maine, writing about what it's like to be lonely. Some folks find this fascinating, although most of what Ms. Sarton logged in her various publications seems to me to be downright boring.

Still, while alive, she managed to rack up as much as $100,000 a year in royalties from their publication. But whether a diary or journal is interesting or boring or whether it is intended for publication probably isn't as important as whether it serves a useful purpose. Ms. Sarton's works, for instance, have inspired a host of women admirers. They became so numerous, in fact, and so obtrusive that she had to move farther away from everyone so she could find solitude again.

Anne Frank's diary, saved from oblivion only by chance--the Nazis who arrested her dumped it out of her father's briefcase onto the floor to make room for something else--has brought home to millions the horrors of the Holocaust in ways not otherwise possible.

Samuel Pepys' diaries, written several hundred years ago, are a priceless, although admittedly limited, glimpse into everyday life in England, just as Harold Nicholson's World War II diaries are valuable for what they show that we didn't know.

Having said all that, I have to admit I've never had much luck keeping a journal or a diary, whether for publication or not. Now and then I record a trip, chiefly so I won't forget all the things we saw, but various tries at daily recordings of what happened in my life have never gotten very far. I'm not sure if it's inertia or that I just don't consider my daily life very interesting, even to myself.

I suppose we ought not to feel that way. Every person's life contains something, some kernel of wonder for those who might get a chance to read about it from a journal or a diary.

My example is a woman, now dead, who wrote a journal entry every day of her life from her 60s almost until she died at 93. For the most part they record things like the weather, how she felt, where she went, what she and her husband ate for supper, how much it cost to go out for dinner and sometimes the letters she received or wrote.

To my knowledge, no one except myself has read them all the way through. And even I, who knew her, find it hard going.

In all those years nothing much ever happened to her, except that she got older and eventually sicker. So why do I find them so fascinating? Well, in part, I suppose, because of the tranquility in which she lived most of her life, and for another, for what she did not write about.

She and her husband lost their only son in World War II, but there's almost no mention of it in her journals. She was from a large family, but there's hardly any mention of her brothers and sisters. They all preceded her in death, but she doesn't mention that. The most moving passage is a minute description of her husband's death from a heart attack and, in the end, careful entries about her own slowly declining state of health.

In short, her journals record nothing and everything about life. And I guess that's what a good journal should do, whether anyone sees it in print or not. For her as for Anne Frank, May Sarton or whomever, a journal is all there, the account of a living person forever fixed in type and time for us to examine, if we will.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Willow Glen Resident.

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