Do you keep a diary? I do. For me, it’s a kind of written memory, helping me keep track of my life. E.B. White once said a person who no longer keeps a diary has lost interest in life. I don’t know if I’d take it to that extreme, but I know how he felt.
There seems to be renewed interest in keeping a diary, although it’s fashionable to refer to it as “journaling.” I suppose the word “diary” carries connotations of a teenaged girl writing about puppy love in green ink, but I don’t think that justifies trying to bang a square peg of a noun like “journal” into a round hole meant for a verb. My friend Joan, a dedicated diarist, thinks if people are going to refer to writing in a diary as “journaling,” they may as well refer to cooking and eating as “fooding.”
Whether or not we record our activities and thoughts on a daily basis, I think we all keep diaries of one sort or another. All the letters or e-mails, faxes and interoffice memos we’ve written over the years, if collected, would tell a version of the story of our lives as true as any other.
My mother has boxes and albums of family photographs, ritually recording decades of holidays. I can line up serials of photos of the same people, grouped in approximately the same order, usually around a birthday cake or in front of an evergreen. I can line them up and watch them age: the short hair grows long, then short again, then turns gray, then disappears. The clothes change from subdued to garish, then back to subdued. The layer cake with the bananas in the middle and whipped cream frosting gives way to creme de menthe bundt cake for a few years, but it soon reclaimed the dining room table and has been unchallenged since. When I look at those pictures, I can smell the evergreen, or the pots of strong coffee we used to drink with our birthday cakes – strong coffee after dinner, no less. I can hear the voices of relatives long dead.
The same holds true for old bank statements, grocery lists and store receipts. We remember when we got the big year-end bonus or the time we tried to be a vegetarian. The other day I opened my road atlas and the receipt fluttered out. The receipt told me I bought the atlas at a bookstore on Broadway in Manhattan at 11:55 a.m. on August 6, 1994. I paid $7.75. In an instant, I had returned – the day, the bookstore, the trip I was planning and the interloping New Yorker with the unsolicited travel advice.
When I was a young newspaper reporter, I used to think the police log was a diary in the life of the community – or at least a certain segment of the community. The Wall Street Journal calls itself “the daily diary of the American dream.” Some of my friends call it “the daily diary of American greed,” but everyone agrees on the diary part.
There have been recent stories in scientific journals about water quality researchers finding pharmaceutical drugs in the water supply. These drugs, which are designed to dissolve easily, are apparently passing not only through our kidneys, but also through our wastewater treatment facilities. Aside from any number of concerns this issue might raise, it struck me that we as a society are writing a diary in the water with our urine, not unlike young boys trying to autograph the snow as they pee. The three medicines found in greatest concentration are contraceptives, pain killers and diet drugs.
I think that’s as accurate a record of our contemporary life in post-industrial society as any. It also speaks to the nature of diaries. They are more loyal to the truth than they are to their authors. As hard as we try to portray ourselves in a particular light, we leave behind clues that testify to the rest of the story.
Diary in the Water
Do you keep a diary? I do. For me, it’s a kind of written memory, helping me keep track of my life. E.B. White once said a person who no longer keeps a diary has lost interest in life. I don’t know if I’d take it to that extreme, but I know how he felt.
There seems to be renewed interest in keeping a diary, although it’s fashionable to refer to it as “journaling.” I suppose the word “diary” carries connotations of a teenaged girl writing about puppy love in green ink, but I don’t think that justifies trying to bang a square peg of a noun like “journal” into a round hole meant for a verb. My friend Joan, a dedicated diarist, thinks if people are going to refer to writing in a diary as “journaling,” they may as well refer to cooking and eating as “fooding.”
Whether or not we record our activities and thoughts on a daily basis, I think we all keep diaries of one sort or another. All the letters or e-mails, faxes and interoffice memos we’ve written over the years, if collected, would tell a version of the story of our lives as true as any other.
My mother has boxes and albums of family photographs, ritually recording decades of holidays. I can line up serials of photos of the same people, grouped in approximately the same order, usually around a birthday cake or in front of an evergreen. I can line them up and watch them age: the short hair grows long, then short again, then turns gray, then disappears. The clothes change from subdued to garish, then back to subdued. The layer cake with the bananas in the middle and whipped cream frosting gives way to creme de menthe bundt cake for a few years, but it soon reclaimed the dining room table and has been unchallenged since. When I look at those pictures, I can smell the evergreen, or the pots of strong coffee we used to drink with our birthday cakes – strong coffee after dinner, no less. I can hear the voices of relatives long dead.
The same holds true for old bank statements, grocery lists and store receipts. We remember when we got the big year-end bonus or the time we tried to be a vegetarian. The other day I opened my road atlas and the receipt fluttered out. The receipt told me I bought the atlas at a bookstore on Broadway in Manhattan at 11:55 a.m. on August 6, 1994. I paid $7.75. In an instant, I had returned – the day, the bookstore, the trip I was planning and the interloping New Yorker with the unsolicited travel advice.
When I was a young newspaper reporter, I used to think the police log was a diary in the life of the community – or at least a certain segment of the community. The Wall Street Journal calls itself “the daily diary of the American dream.” Some of my friends call it “the daily diary of American greed,” but everyone agrees on the diary part.
There have been recent stories in scientific journals about water quality researchers finding pharmaceutical drugs in the water supply. These drugs, which are designed to dissolve easily, are apparently passing not only through our kidneys, but also through our wastewater treatment facilities. Aside from any number of concerns this issue might raise, it struck me that we as a society are writing a diary in the water with our urine, not unlike young boys trying to autograph the snow as they pee. The three medicines found in greatest concentration are contraceptives, pain killers and diet drugs.
I think that’s as accurate a record of our contemporary life in post-industrial society as any. It also speaks to the nature of diaries. They are more loyal to the truth than they are to their authors. As hard as we try to portray ourselves in a particular light, we leave behind clues that testify to the rest of the story.