Many of us at some point, generally in a new year, have probably decided to “keep a diary,” as part of a grand and comprehensive plan to better organize someone’s life and achieve great things – plans, I need fear, which is soon run ashore on the dangerous shoals of daily life. We must all have wished we had written down at the time our memories of great events or even of small, but lively meetings and events – but we have not done so and our memory is soon over. sad.
Some diaries make the most vivid and beautiful reading. You only have to think of Samuel Pepys, a civil servant, scholar, music lover, gentleman and great 17th century English Admiral diarist. He lived more than three centuries ago, and yet he speaks to us as an old friend next door as fresh as this morning – about his fears and hopes, his work and his daughters, his joy and his hatred , his great achievements and abominable failures.