Not so, I've realised.
My diary was a two-headed beast, and the two sat awkwardly beside on another. On one neck was my deep introspection. (An example at random from my Peruvian journal: "I miss laughing with her, and watching her laugh with other people.") Whilst on the other was my monkish transcribing of extracts: from the books I had with me, from newspapers, or from the great ideas in my head that seemed to warrant a wider audience.
Now I can divide the two.
The fluff can stay behind closed covers, biding its time mischievously until the biographers arrive, whilst the larger musings can fight it out in the blogarena.
One caveat to this. Like the best non-fiction writers, the best bloggers seem to be alive to the sweet taste of allusion. A lot of columnists tell us just enough about their lives to hook us; again, Geoff Dyer is the master:
Desperately lonely in Peru, I came across this in a Geoff Dyer article on - was it statues?:
I see your face everywhere, wandering through it like rain and the drifting steam of streets. I wake at four in the morning and think of you doing ordinary things: hunting for your glasses that you can never find, taking the tube to work, buying wine at the supermarket.But my favourite, recently discovered, is this. In his book on The Great War, GD spends a few pages discussing the letters to and from loved ones, before inserting this:
Propped against the bar of the Cafe de l'Industrie, I open an envelope with my name in your writing. The second paragraph wonders, in your latest flourish of colloquial English, how I am 'bearing up.'
Technorati Tags: Geoff Dyer, The Great War, Diary Keeping
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1 comment:
Blog.
Diaries are terrible things: they take the best bits of your life and glaze them with gold, waiting to sneak up on you when you're eighty and make you wish you were a young buck again. I might write one now as a precaution, which tells me that I was a miserable youth and that my slide was always too round.
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