Many of us at some time or another, generally in a new year, 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 very 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 most 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 live.
Why does anyone keep a diary? For a man conscientious about his career perhaps it is in order to keep a record of his mounting success and developing ambition. For a writer it may be to record notes for future use in his books. For those close to great men and great events possibly it is for history’s sake. Perhaps for some it is the desire to record something of one’s life for one’s descendants so that it does not utterly vanish down the years – no man’s life should be left a blank for his children and grandchildren. But to me the best reason is simple and clear. Kilvert expresses it like this: “Why do I keep this voluminous diary? I can hardly tell. Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it almost seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some record as this.”
For myself I use a journal to record a small selection of life’s events which bless and dismay me each day, but also to recall a little about what deeply matters in the world. Two entries.
● Growing older. As one ages, two opposing inclinations contend. The first is to relax, withdraw from the hurly-burly, take a little rest before the night of the long journey. The other inclination remains so far a little stronger in me, I don’t know for how much longer. It is summed up in one of my favourite poems, Sheila Wingfield’s good poem about the Chinese Emperor Hsuang-Tsung:
Hsuang Tsung, great emperor,
Giddy and ill and old, carried in a litter,
Saw the stars sway,
His conquests and his arguments,
And his powers, falling into fever with himself,
Pulsed their lives away.
Bow to his shade. To be at rest is but a dog
That sighs and settles: better
The unrelenting day.
● Hurt no one. There is a simple poem – hardly a poem, more an articulation of the heart on paper – by the great cellist Pablo Casals which he once jotted down for the children he loved beyond even his great art.
“When will we teach our children what they are?
One should say to each of them:
Do you know what you are? You are a marvel!
You are unique! In all the world there is no
Other child exactly like you! In the millions
Of years that have passed, there has never been
Another child like you!
And look at your body, what a wonder it is!
Your legs, your arms, your curving fingers, the
Way you move! You may become a Shakespeare,
A Michelangelo, a Beethoven, a Mother Teresa.
You have the capacity for anything.
Yes, you are a marvel, and when you grow up,
can you harm another who is, like you, a marvel?
No, hurt no one, bring only the joy you can!”
No man’s life is so obscure or ordinary that it is not filled with beauty and humour and strangeness and interest worth recording. At the same time, no great man’s life is so great that it is not filled with the most ordinary things also worth recording. Every minute is precious – I like what was said of Bernard Berenson, the great art historian: “He loved life. When he was very old, about 90, he said to his friends: ‘I would willingly stand at street-corners, hat in hand, asking passers-by to drop their unused minutes into it’.”
I leave you with one such diary entry that I remember reading. It is by an old man, called William Allingham. His name means nothing to you or me – he is in his study, he has had a hard harassing day at work which he has fully and rather laboriously recorded in his diary. Then suddenly he writes a last sentence for the day he has spent:
“In the evening walked sadly along the shore of the
Solent, eastwards by Pykewell – returning, brought
home a
glow-worm and put it in a lily, through which it
shone.”
For me that entry lights up like a poem and I see the old man now in my mind’s eye looking down in his dark study at the firefly winking in the lily and, for me, this late December night lights up with all the beauty of man’s far-imagining mind.
It is a new year. Think of the good as well as the sadness you have known in 2020, consider the adventures and the friendships and the sweetness one is bound to have discovered as well as the grief and unpleasantness and the blows and irritations that also must have come. You can be sure that 2021 will be as full again of life’s marvelous and terrible variety. Could I suggest you find the time to record now and then something of the light and shadow that flickers over all our lives and is so soon gone again?
