Many of us, at some time or another, have resolved to “keep a diary,” probably as part of some grand and comprehensive plan to organize one’s life better and achieve great things – plans, I am afraid, which soon run aground on the dangerous shoals of everyday living. All of us must have wished that we had written down at the time our memories of great events or even of minor, but vivid, personal meetings and happenings – but we have not done so and our memory of them soon sadly dims.
Some diaries make vivid and lovely reading. You only have to think of Samuel Pepys, the great 17th century English Admiralty civil servant, scholar, music lover, womanizer and diarist. He lived over three centuries ago, yet he speaks to us like an old friend next door as fresh as this morning – about his fears and his hopes, his work and his women, his joys and his hates, his great achievements and his abject failures.
But Pepys was a great man who lived in the midst of great men and great events. You would expect his diary to be interesting. But what about Francis Kilvert, an obscure village curate, living a most ordinary life in the depths of 19th century rural England. Nothing exceptional about him – yet his diary, full of ordinary and transitory everyday things, has made him immortal.
