Down Memory Lane

[poliphilo]

I take down my paper diary and browse. I do this every once in a while. I think it will be amusing to drop in on my former self.  It never is.

It's more like wading through a morass.

Did I have a sense of humour in 1995? I certainly believed I did. But where's the evidence?

What makes the past such a gloomy place? I think it's the earnestness, the solemnity my past self displays in relation to things that just don't matter any more.

1995 is another century. Unreal. A world of ghosts.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I burned a set of diaries I wrote in my late teens and early twenties. I regret it now.

One's own diary is always depressing and embarassing and humiliating to read. But other people's diaries are fascinating.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

But other people's diaries are fascinating.

When I dip into my memories, whether on paper or not, more than half the time I just feel embarrassed.

I love reading other people's diaries, and I forgive them their naivety and ignorance and youthful mistakes and view their lives, no matter how vile, with compassion ("you poor thing"), but can't do that for myself.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

With other people's diaries it's the follies and faux pas that give them spice.

I'm very fond of James Boswell's London Journal- the record of a particularly obnoxious, mean-spirited, self-righteous, social-climbing young Scot on the make and the razzle in 18th century London.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

In my thirties I loved the diaries of May Sarton, which were really meant for publication, but still were about the life of a [rather arrogant and insecure and narcissistic] writer living alone in Maine.

Her diaries went on and on, through her love affairs (she was a lesbian and always in love with someone who broke her heart), her stroke, and her final illness. Right up to the end, she was a compulsive writer. She spent lots of time anguishing and being infuriated that the critics ignored her poetry (which, sorry: it wasn't that wonderful, actually, to my ear, anyway). She grew more and more hostile to her readers, and finally was so full of herself that, while waiting in a restaurant with friends, she roared (she was always roaring at people): "Why is our service so slow? Do you know who I am?"

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Oh dear.

People who roar,"Do you know who I am?" are destined for one of the lowest circles of hell.

No, that's unfair. They're people for whom we should feel sorry.

I'm fond of Dag Hammarskjold's diary- "Markings". Very earnest. Very Swedish. I read the other day that Swedes hate W.H. Auden's "translation" of it because he peppered it with in-jokes and messages to his boyfriend.

Naughty Wystan!

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Well, good for him!

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Oh, and May was a major name-dropper. She clung to Virginia Woolf, who basically brushed her off, and wrote that Woolf was interested in others but never warm.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm sure Woolf's own diaries are well worth reading.

A book I loved as a boy was a thing called Death In the Air- the diary of a WW1 fighter pilot. It came complete with gorgeous photographs of aerial dogfights.

I have since learned that the thing is a complete fake- and all the planes in the photographs were models.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

It's like listening to your own voice on a tape-recorder--but worse.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Yes!