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.
