KEEPING A DIARY.

Previously on this subject I wrote the following. “The trick to keeping a good diary is to write only the things that, first, you will (in the future) want to remember. And that, second, you would, if you didn’t write them down, forget. The problem is that right now you don’t know what in the future you will want to remember. Neither do you know what you will forget until you have forgotten it. At which point it will be too late.”

The question I have now is: What are the reasons for keeping a diary? By which I mean a record of what you did and what happened in your life. When I read articles on the subject of reasons to keep a diary most of the reasons given are ones which don’t require you to keep what you have written. These reasons are things like improving writing skills, being creative in the use of language, getting to a clearer understanding of yourself and the events you are writing about, simply expressing your feelings and “getting them out of your system” (like Winston Smith). For all of these benefits you don’t need to keep what you’ve written; you could just destroy it immediately afterwards.

What reasons for writing would require you to keep what you have written? It would be to remember things. But why do you want to remember? (The exact same question might be asked about history given that history is like the diary of successive generations of people.)

Here are some possible reasons.

(1) Nostalgia. Simply to look back and enjoy the feelings evoked by this. But what are these feelings?

(2) To learn from experience. This is what scientists do when they keep a record of experiments. A simple example of it from ordinary life is that if you read a lot of books you might want to keep a record of what you have read so you don’t start reading something you’ve previously already tried reading and decided you didn’t like.

(3) Having a record of things like conversations with others. So that you can (later in an argument with one of them) say: “no, on such a date you said!”.

(4) Just to fight against the transience. Sometimes walking around I will see something happen, something insignificant like one stranger bumps into another and says sorry. And I think to myself: this is a unique event. So many details: which parts of their bodies came into contact, the exact words they used to apologise, what they were thinking about before the collision, what they were wearing, the weather. All these things will be completely forgotten probably before the day ends. This event will become less knowable than some incident from two thousand years ago which people took the trouble to make a record of. It will be as if it had never happened.

Of these, 1 and 4 seem to be just some kind of futile “clinging to the past”. You think that retaining these memories somehow adds to the quality of your life but I’m not sure that it does.

Point 2 is maybe the most important. The things people say about history apply to your personal history too. Quote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Or (misquote of something similar): “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

There are some problems of accuracy. In a diary we tend to record significant things. So if there is some one small thing that happens (or that you do) every day for 100 days you are less likely to record that than some thing that’s 100 times bigger but that happens just once. But the small thing is as much a part of what your life is (was) like as the big thing. If you go on holiday and see the Taj Mahal you will record the event of your visit but you might not record how exactly you made tea in the morning every day while you were there.

If you keep a diary to improve your memory of your past then regular re-reading is essential. I guess you should also index (tag) entries so that you can easily look up all things about a particular subject. There’s the danger that you spend so much time per day writing in your journal that you never get any time to read it back. Which then defeats the purpose.

Or you could keep a diary with the intention of never looking at again until you’re like aged 70. So that then you can have that sense of having old memories suddenly rushing back into your mind. But then you can end up with getting an account of something you did but you don’t remember it. Which means that, as far as you are concerned, that could be a description of anybody doing that thing. What you want is for what you read to evoke an actual memory.

[11 May 2017 etc]