My Diary

I mentioned in yesterday's blog post that I am building a website for my brother's business. In a discussion yesterday I mentioned that he probably wanted to get a paid Google account for the site so that hs site would come up early in searches. I told him we can put the site up and it can look perfectly professional but it doesn't do him any good if no one visits.

You've perhaps also noticed my last two entries in the "Excerpt" category have come from the book I began yesterday, Elizabeth Bowen's Death of the Heart. The opening sequence involved a discussion between a woman (Anna) and a male friend in which she discloses coming across her husband's teenage half-sister's diary and found the girl had written horrible things about everyone in the family, especially Anna herself. The male friend, a writer, tries to make Anna feel better by talking about the act of writing in general, and of keeping a diary. Read the two "Excerpts" immediately below for more elaboration.

I put these two thoughts together while walking this morning. I keep my own sort of diary - you're reading it right now - and it's out in a public space but it may as well be under lock and key. No one reads it. But that's okay. Like the second Excerpt quote says, "a diary, after all, is written to please oneself – therefore it’s bound to be enormously written up. The obligation to write it is all in one’s own eye..." I keep this blog for my own pleasure, in order, as I've said before, to work out my own thoughts. And I do feel an obligation to keep it up, especially so being so far into the endeavor. I dropped blogging for four or fives months earlier this year but I am back now and enjoying it. Writing makes my mind work in ways that it doesn't when I'm not writing. I start seeing associations between things that I wouldn't otherwise. It expands my though processes. The world opens up.

So, while I would like to have regular readers, it's not necessary for my main purpose here. I have not yet reached the point of Joseph Epstein, whom I quoted in a blog post a few years back about his own habit of keeping a journal:

Keeping a journal or diary, once begun in earnest, becomes more an addiction than a habit. I cannot now imagine abandoning mine. I continue to scribble each morning, living my life at a second remove, with nothing in it quite real until it has been scrawled out in my increasingly poor handwriting. “When all is said and done,” Siegfried Sassoon wrote, “a good life is better than a good diary.” No doubt, but please note that Sassoon makes this observation in his diary. You may think this essay has at last come to its conclusion, but it will really only be done tomorrow morning, when, in my journal, I write, “Finished essay on journals and diaries. Am, as usual, uncertain of its quality.”

- but almost.