Exercises:

Your “vacation assignment” is to write five journal-entries of 200-250 words each. The entries need not be sequential. However, each one should be a detailed account in some form of thoughts you have and/or events you experience on a particular day. The “catch” is this: the narrative “T” of each journal entry should in each case be a different person. (For example, if your first entry is straightforwardly autobiographical, your second might be the commentary of someone over fifty hears old. Your third might be written by someone of the opposite sex, your fourth by someone you dislike, and–possibly quite tricky–your fifth by someone with whom you think you are well-acquainted–a sibling, a cousin, your best friend, etc.)

While the material you work with should be consistent (i.e., each entry, no matter what its point of view, should be based on events in your own day-to-day life), the styles of your entries should vary markedly. Remember, though, that any change in diction level within a specific entry, or from one entry to the next, should be purposeful and controlled, and should point to significant aspects of your observers’ personalities. In addition, each diarist should have a particular audience in mind–a literary public; the diarist herself only; a sister, who is bound to peek at the diary; the previous day’s diarist, etc.

Finally, one of your entries should be a commonplace-book entry, in which something your have read becomes as important as anything else that might be on your diarist’s mind. Organize this entry around a quotation that you find interesting and worth pondering (i.e., an extract from a novel, a poem, a newspaper, someone else’s journal or diary, a children’s story, an advertisement, or whatever).

Examples:

1.

It was reported by way of Scandal upon the Buriers, that if any Corpse was delivered to them, decently wound up as we call’d it then, in a Winding Sheet Ty’d over the Head and Feet, which some did, and which was generally of good Linen; I say, it was reported, that the Buriers were so wicked as to strip them in the Cart, and carry them quite naked to the Ground: But as I can not easily credit any thing so vile among Christians, and at a Time so fill’d with Terrors, as that was, I can only relate it and leave it undetermined.

(Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 1665)

2.

From Selected Journals of Thoreau:

(1852) Feb. 18… I have a commonplace-book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in my mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success. They are translated from earth to heaven. I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant–perhaps transmuted more into the substance of the human mind–I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all.

(1851) June 7… One of those gentle, straight-down rainy days, when the rain begins by spotting the cultivated fields as if shaken from a pepper-box; a fishing day, when I see one neighbor after another, having donned his oil-cloth suit, walking or riding past with a fish-pole, having struck work: –a day and an employment to make philosophers of them all.

3.

from the Diary of Virginia Woolf:

Juan les Pins, Tuesday, May 9th (1933)
Yes, I thought, I will make a note of that face–the face of the woman stitching a very thin, lustrous green silk at a table in the restaurant where we lunched at Vienne. She was like fate–a consummat mistress of all the arts of self-preservation: hair rolled and 1 ” lustrous; eyes so nonchalant; nothing could startle her; there she sat stitching her green silk with people going and coming all the time; she not looking, yet knowing, fearing nothing; expecting nothing–a perfectly equipped middle class Frenchwoman.
At Carpentras last night there was the little servant girl with honest eyes, hair brushed in a flop and one rather black tooth. I felt that life would crush her out inevitably. Perhaps 18, not more; yet on the wheel, without hope; poor, not weak but mastered–yet not enough mastered but to desire furiously to travel, for a moment, in a car. Ah but I am not rich, she said to me–which her cheap little stockings and shoes showed anyhow. Oh how I envy you, able to travel. You like Carpentras? But the wind blows ever so hard. You’ll come again? That’s the bell ringing. Never mind. Come over here and look at this. No. I’ve never seen anyting like it. Ah yes, she always likes the English (“She” was the other maid, with hair like some cactus in erection.) Yes I always like the English she said. The odd little honest face, with the black tooth, will stay on at Carpentras I suppose: will mari will become one of those stout black women who sit in the door knitting? No: I foretell for her some tragedy: because she had enough mind to envy us the Lanchester.

4.
from Emerson’s Journals:

Sunday, April 18, 1824

“Nil fuit umquam sic dispar sibi” Hor.**

I am beginning my professional studies. In a month I shall be legally a man. And I deliberately dedicate my time, my talents, + my hopes to the Church. Man is an animal that looks before and after; and I should be loth to reflect at a remote period that I took so solemn a step in my existence without some careful examination of my past and present life. Since I cannot alter I would not repent the resolution I have made this page must be witness to the latest year of my life whether I have good ground to warrant my determination.

* “Never was a creature so inconsistent.” Horace, Satires.

5.

from the Diary of Samuel Sewall:

Nov. 4, 1692. Law passes for Justices and Ministers Marrying persons. By order of the Committee, I had drawn up a Bill for Justices and such others as the Assembly should appoint to marry; but came new- drawn and thus alter’d from the Deputies. It seems they count the respect of it too much to be left any longer with the Magistrate. And Salaries are not spoken of; as if one sort of Men might
live on Aer. They are treated like a kind of useless, worthless folk.

Nov. 5. No disturbance at night by Bonfires.

Nov. 6. Joseph threw a knop of brass and hit his Sister Betty on the forehead so as to make it bleed and swell; upon which, and for his playing at Prayer-time, and eating when Return Thanks I whip’ him pretty smartly. When I first went in (call’d by his Grandmother) he sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind the head of the Cradle: which gave me the sorrowful remembrance of Adam’s carriage.

cowful

6.

from the Diary of William Byrd

December 3,1709. I rose at 5 o’clock and read two chapters in Hebrew and some Greek in Cassius. I said my prayers and ate milk for breakfast. I danced my dance. for which I made him drink a pint of piss. Eugene pissed abed again and read some news. About 12 o’clock I went to court where I settled some accounts found some good company. and Colonel Eppes to come and dine with me. I ate a venison pasty However, I persuaded Mr. Anderson for dinner. In the evening, Mr. Anderson and I walked to Mr. Harrison’s where we found James Burwell and Isham Randolph. Here I ate custard and was merry. When I came home my wife was in bed. I stayed till 9 o’clock and when I and had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thanks be I neglected to say my prayers to God Almighty.

Journals

1. “That woman Estelle,'” the note reads, “is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today.’ Dirty crepe- de-Chine wrapper. hotel bar. Wilmington RR. 9:45 A. M. August Monday morning.”
Since the note is in my notebook, it presumably has some meaning to me.. I study it for a long while. At first I have only the most general notion of what I was doing on an August Monday morning in the bar of the hotel across from the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Wilmington, Delaware (waiting for a train? missing one? 1960? 1961? why Wilmington?), but I do remember being there. The woman in the diry crepe-de-Chine wrapper had come down from her room for a beer, and the bartender had heard before the reason why George Sharp and she were separated today. “Sure,” he said, and went on mopping the floor. “You told me.” At the other end of the bar is a girl. She is talking, pointedly, not to the man beside her but to a cat lying the triangle of sunlight cast through the open door. She is wearing A plaid silk dress from Peck & Peck, and the hem is coming down…

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I I keep a notebook at all? . It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delights with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss….

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I every been able to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few Occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are
results are mysterious at best. What is this business about “shopping, typing piece, dinner with E. depressed”? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this “E” depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares?

(Joan Didion, “On Keeping A Notebook”)

2. I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. I rul’d each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, makring each column with a letter for the day. I crossed these columes with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line, and its proper column, I might mark, by a little black stop, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue that day.

           Sun.    Mon.   Tues. Wed.   Thu.    Fri.      Sat.     Sun.
Tem.
Sil.         *          *                       *                    *
Ord.       *          *                                  *         *           *
Res                    *                                             *
Fru.                    *                                             *
Ind.                                *

(Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography)

3. A man that begins to Study at Six in the morning will have gained 8 years when he has studied 50 years, over him who begins only at 8 – vice versa, he that lies abed till eight will have lost 8 years — 2 hours a day for meals — when you have lived 50 years you will have spent 8 years in eating.

One hour a day        365 hours in a year
50
—
18,250 hours – at one hour a day
2
—
36,500 hours at two a day in 50 years

365 days in a year   8 days
—
3041 days
2980
61
36,500
36
50
48
20
12
8

In 25 years you will have lost four years

12–½….2 years
6-¼….1 year
3 and 6 weeks…1/2 year
1 six months and 3 weeks…1/4 year
9 months 1 week 3 days 1/2 … 6 weeks
4 1/2- 4 days & 1/2  1/8 … 10
13 days 1/2  1 day 1/4  1/16….5 days
1/2  1/2  day 1/4  1/2 …. 2 days
1/4 … 1 day

(Benjamin Robert Haydon (9 July 1810))

3. Rainy weather.Does the weather matter in a journal?  Lunched alone; does that matter?  (Grilled turbot and apple pudding, if you want full details.)

(Siegfried Sassoon (13 Jan 1921))

4. Brunswick Hotel, Boston, November 25th, 1881
If I should write here all that I might write, I should speedily fill this as yet unspotted blank-book, bought in London six months ago, but hitherto unopened. It is so long since I have kept any notes, taken any memoranda, written down my current
reflections, taken a sheet of paper, as it were, into my confidence. Meanwhile so much has come and gone, so much that it is now too late to catch, to reproduce, to preserve. I have lost too much by losing, or rather by not having acquired, the note- taking habit. It might be of great profit to me;. and now that I am older, that I have more time, that the labour of writing is less onerous to me, and I can work more at my leisure, I ought to endeavour to keep, to a certain extent, a record of passing impressions, of all that comes, that goes, that I see, and feel, and observe. To catch and keep something of life–that’s what I mean.

(Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James)

5. Rather good work all these last days; I interrupt this journal, which is reduced to the dull notation of facts. Good solely as a way of getting into the habit of writing.

(Gide, 1912)

6. 26th February, 1941. I walk back under to cold stars with some shells bursting about them. I am rather fussed about this diary. It is not intimate enough to give a personal picture. The really important things that I know I cannot record. And this gives a picture of someone else on the edge of things who is so certain that he knows what is really happening that he does not dare say so. The day-to-day impressions of a greengrocer in Streatham would really be more interesting. I must try henceforward to be more intimate and more illuminating. It is half that I feel that if I survive, this diary will for me be a record from which I can fill in remembered details. And half. that I find some relief in putting down on paper the momentary sports and gushes of this cataract of history.

(Sir Harold Nicholson)

7. I am fallen sadly behind in my journal. I should live no more than I can record, as one should not have more corn growing than one can get in.
There is a waste of good if it be not preserved.

(James Bowell (17 March 1776))

8. I spoke of a memoir. Is that what this chronicle will prove to be? Time will show. At this moment, a page old, it feels more like a diary than a memoir. Well, let it be a diary then. How I regret that I did not keep one earlier, what a record that would have been! But now the main events of my life are over and there is to be nothing but ‘recollection in tranquillity’

Of course there is no need to separate ‘memoir’ from ‘diary’ or ‘philosophical journal’. I can tell you, reader, about my past life and about my ‘world-view’ also, as I ramble along. Why not? It can all come out naturally as I reflect. Thus unanxiously (for am I not now leaving anxiety behind?) I shall discover my ‘literary form’. In any case, why decide now? Later if I please, I can regard these ramblings as rough notes for a more coherent account. Who knows indeed how interesting I shall I begin to tell it? Perhaps I shall bring to date and as it were float my present find my past life when the story gradually up upon my past?

(Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea)

9. Sunday 28 December [1915]

Probably the last entry this year, & not likely to be the most articulate. Twenty two days gap to be accounted for chiefly by illness: first L.’s [Leonard’s] which dribbled on; then much in the same way I was attached–8 days in bed, down today sofa, & on the away to Monks House tomorrow. It was influenza–what they call a low type, but prolonged, & sponging on the head as it always does. Not much to say therefore, even if I could say it. Indeed since L. started his malarial type, we’ve seen few people; & I, for the last 10 days, mone at all. volumes of the Life of Butler; & am Memoirs–both superbly fit for illness. paring the bark off feelings: all left a little raw, but vivid–a lack of sap though; & stage dry towards the finish. ‘fame’ & books played Isn’t this ‘reputation’

But I’ve read two vast racing through Greville Butler has the effect of so thinly set as to be dull & bone. struck by the enormous space in his a life so bare of human relations. deepest of all masculine instincts? Almost at the end, when people began to praise, his life put forth a little flower; but too late. For such a critical & contemptuous mind, the value attached to reviews seems queer. Why, I dont think half or quarter so much of mine! … It don’t (the Life …I mean) increase one’s respect for human nature. Here was something I expected to admire greatly; & the pettinesses are therefore more devastating than in the case of another….

Here I run on, but must stop. Oh yes, I’ve enjoyed reading the past years diary, & shall keep it up. I’m amused to find how its grown a person, with almost a face of its own.

-Virginia Woolf, The Diary of… (THIS ONE NEEDS REVIEWING FOR ERRORS)

10. …Ottoline keeps one [a diary] by the way, devoted however to ‘inner life’; which made me reflect that I haven’t an inner life” (22 Nov 1917). [Lady Ottoline (Morrell) wrote of the same conversation that “When we were talking about keeping I said mine was journal filled with thoughts and struggles of my inner life. She opened her eyes wide in astonishment.”]

(Virginia Woolf)

11.
Before leaving I reread all of my journal; I did so with inexpressible disgust.
I find nothing in it but pride; pride even in the manner of expressing myself. Always some form of pretentiousness, claiming either to be profound or to be witty. My pretensions to metaphysics are absurd; that constant analysis of one’s thoughts, that lack of action, those rules of conduct are the most tiresome, insipid, and almost incomprehensible things in the world when one has got beyond them. I could never get back into certain of those moods, which nevertheless I know to have been sincere. To me this is all over, a closed book, an emotion that has cooled off forever.

…The desire to compose the pages of this journal deprives them [the “complicated things” in his lifel of all worth, even that of sincerity. They do not really mean anything, never being well enough written to have a literary value. In short, all of them take for granted a future fame or celebrity that will confer an interest upon them. And that is utterly base. … I almost tore it all up; at least I suppressed many pages. [Note from Gide: Since then I have almost entirely burned the first journal. (1902)

Andre Gide, Journal (1893)

12. Sunday, Dec. 23rd/I do not understand the first sentence of the above–I wrote them after that convulsed or suffocated by a collection of wind in my stomach & alternately tortured by its colic pangs in my bowels, I in despair drank three glasses running of whisky & water/the violent medicine answered–I have been feeble in body during the next day, & active in mind–& how strange that with so shaken a nervous System I never have the Head ache!–I verily am a stout-headed, weak-bowelled, and O! most pitiably weak-hearted Animal! But I leave it, as I wrote it–& likewise have refused to destroy the stupid drunken Letter to Southey, which I wrote in the sprawling characters of Drunkenness/ If I should perish without having the power of destroying these & my other pocket books, the history of my own mind for my Own improvement, O friend! Truth! Truth! but yet Charity! Charity! I have never loved Evil for its own sake; no! nor ever sought pleasure for its own sake, but only as the means of escaping from pains that coiled round my mental powers, as a serpent around the body & wings of an Eagle! My sole sensuality was not to be in pain!–

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks)

13. Jan.2–This morning I made the meditation on the Three Sins, with nothing to enter but loathing of my life and a barren submission to God’s will. The body cannot rest when it is in pain nor the mind be peace as long as something bitter distills in it and it aches.
This may be at any time and is at many: how then can it be pretended there is for those who feel this anything worth calling happiness in this world? There is a happiness, but it is not happiness now. It is as if one were dazzled by a spark or star in the dark, seeing it but not seeing by it: we want a light shed on our way and a happiness spread over our life
Afternoon: on the same–more loathing and only this thought, can do my spiritual and other duties better with God’s In particular I think it may be well to resolve to make the examine every day at 1.15 and then say vespers and compline if not said before. I will consider what next

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, Retreat Notes)

that I
help.

14. May 9–
This day and May 22 the bluebells in the little wood between the College and the highroad and in one of the Hurst Green cloughs. In the little wood/ opposite the light/ they stood in blackish spreads or sheddings like the spots on a snake. The heads are then like thongs and solemn in grain and grape- colour…It was a lovely sight.–The bluebells in your hand baffle you with their inscape, made to every sense: if
you draw your fingers through them they are lodged and struggle with a shock of wet heads; the long stalks rub and click and flatten to a fan on one another like your fingers themselves would when you passed the palms hard across one another, making a brittle rub and jostle like the noise of ahurdle strained by leaning against; then there is the faint honey smell and in the mouth the sweet gum when you bite them. But this is easy, it is the eye they baffle. They give one a fancy of panpipes and of some wind instrument with stops–a trombone perhaps. The overhung necks– for growing they are little more than a staff with simple crook but in water, where they stiffen, they take stronger turns, in the head like sheephoods or, when more waved throughout, like the waves riding through a ship that is being smacked–what with these overhung necks and what with the crisped ruffled bells dropping mostly on one side and the gloss these have at their footstalks they have an air of the knights at chess. Then the knot or ”knoop of buds some shut, some just gaping, which makes the pencil of the whole spike, should be noticed: the inscape of the flower most finely carried out in the siding of the axes, each striking a greater and greater slant, is finished in these clutered buds, which for the most part are not straightened but rise to the end like a tongue and this and their tapering and a little flattening they have make them look like the heads of snakes
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

15. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeks ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful [] they grew. among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The Bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the sea.

(Dorothy Wordsworth, 15 April 1802)

16. …To whom, then, must I dedicate my wonderful, surprising and interesting Adventures?–to whom dare I reveal my private opinion of my nearest relations?
my secret thoughts of my dearest friends? my own hopes, fears, reflections, and dislikes? –Nobody!

To Nobody, then, will I write my journal! since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved — to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my life! For what chance, what accident can end my connections with Nobody? No secret can I conceal from Nobody, and to Nobody can I be ever unreserved…!

(Fanny Burney (Mme. D’Arblay), 17 March 1768 (age 16))

17.

DIARY.–If you’re discreet, read no farther. If you’re not discreet but nevertheless an honorable man in the essential things, read on and make fun of the author, but don’t repeat what you’ve read.

Coste, Infantry Commander.

Diary begun February 4, 1813, in Paris, Rue Neuve-de-Luxembourg, No. 3.
February 4.–I have no memory, none at all, and the result is that, whenever I’ve been discreet in the diaries of MY LIFE WITH Minette. It required an effort of imagination to recall what I had wanted to say. I was well pleased with myself in 1806, the essential was majestic, frequently eclipsed by asininities of affection and bashfulness.

I believe I am extremely sensitive, that’s the outstanding trait. The sensibility is pushed to excesses that, if recounted, would be unintelligible to anyone but Felix, and even for him much talking is necessary.

This faculty produces charming thoughts, which vanish like a flash of lightning. I haven’t yet been able to get into the habit of writing them on the wing, although I’ve bought notebooks for that purpose several times.

(Stendhal)

18. “…But I should never write what had happened down. One’s nature is to forget, and one ought to go by that. Memory is quite unbearable enough, but even so it elaves out quite a lot. It wouldn’t let one down as gently, even, as that if it weren’t more than half a fake – we remember to suit ourselves. No, oneself swallow carry the past.
really, er, Portia, believe me: if one didn’t let some few lies, I don’t know how one would ever Thank God except at its one moment there’s never any such thing as a bare fact. Ten minutes later, half an hour later, one’s begun to gloze the fact over with a deposit of some word. The hours I spent with thee dear love are like a string of pearls to me. But a diary (if one did keep it up to date) would come much too near the mark. One ought to secrete for some time before one begins to look back at anything.

Look how reconciled to everything reminiscences are…Also, suppose somebody read it?
“You’re working on us, making us into something. Which is not fair–we are not on our guard with you. For instance, now I know you keep this book, I shall always feel involved in some sort of plan. You precipitate things. I daresay’, said St. Quentin kindly, that what you write is quite silly, but all the same, you are taking a liberty. You set traps for us. You ruin our free will.”

“I write what has happened. I don’t invent.”
“You put constructions on things. You are a most dangerous girl.”

(Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart)

19.

Friday 29 January 1915

Shall I say ‘nothing happened today’ as we used to do in tour diaries, when they were beginning to die? It wouldn’t be true. The day is rather like a leafless tree: there are all sorts of colours in it, if you look closely. But the outline is bare enough. We worked: after lunch we walked down the river to that great mediaeval building which juts out into the river–It is I think a vast mill. And we came back early, so that L. might have tea before he went to a Committee at Hampstead. After that I bought our food & did not observe much of interest. But the fact of the day for me has been a vague kind of discomfort, caused by the eccentric character of the new servant Maud. When one speaks to her, she stops dead & looks at the ceiling. She bursts into the room ‘just to see if your are there’. She is an angular woman of about 40, who never stays long in any place. I believe she lives in dread of something. She puts down plates with a start. Mrs Le Grys says that she herself is going mad, with Maud’s peculiarities. She has just announced that she is the daughter of a Colonel. I am sure her brain is full of illusions, poor creature; & shouldn’t be surprised at anything. The only question is, how she contrives to exist.

(Virginia Woolf)

20.

To set down such choice experiences that my own writings may inspire me and at last I may make wholes of parts. Certainly it is a distinct profession to rescue from oblivion and to fix the sentiments and thoughts which visit all men more or less generally, that the contemplation of the unfinished picture may suggest its harmonious completion.

Associate reverently and as much as you can with your loftiest thoughts. Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing, of keeping a journal that so we remember our best hours and stimulate ourselves. My thoughts are my company. They have a certain individuality and separate existence, aye, personality. Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field which it was possible to labor  and to think. Thought begat thought.

(Thoreau (1852))