open thread #8: do you keep a diary?

Last night I had dinner with a pal from Toronto when the subject of diaries came up. He told me he started keeping one religiously over thirty-five years ago. When he said “diary” he meant it in the formal rather than the creative sense — a record of what happened that day. What he did, who he saw, how he felt. Just the facts. He limited himself to one page. Not judgement or tangents. He was careful to distinguish his diary from a journal, which is a far more daunting commitment. Diaries, above all, are about order and time-keeping.

Like most diarists, my friend was evangelical about the practice— but not for the reasons you might think. He said that being able to instantly look back to a random Wednesday afternoon in April, say, 17 years ago and find out exactly what he’d done was both heartening and unnerving.

“I have a very good memory,” he said, “but like everybody, I forget so much — and what I do forget is instructive. It’s invariably the negative stuff. Slights and disagreements. All the things that drove me nuts at the time just seem to vanish — poof!”

He added that in a way his diary was a security blanket; it helped him stave off mortal dread because it created the illusion his life was being preserved somehow— that he wasn’t (like the rest of us) slipping toward the inevitable one day and minute at a time. I found our conversation utterly fascinating and have decided to start keeping a daily record myself just to see what happens.

So the topic for this week’s open thread is diaries: Do you keep one? If so why? If not, why not? How does a diary compare to keeping a journal? Is worth it? What do you get from it?

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