Diarist

Reading selections from a diary is a strange kind of encounter. It's as if someone were talking to a two-way mirror. The writer is not addressing us or anyone else, at least not directly; indeed the audience (ourselves if we are readers) must don the diarist's face to receive these confidences.

Still, there is something intriguing about the chance to visit another person's soul, to look around, peer over the shoulder, listen to the musings, the rantings, the assemblings of the courage necessary to write the next entry. I may want to comfort or advise, but I am like a ghost, able to haunt but not to help.

If the diary is published (and not posthumously), we are in a no less strange position, performed for by someone performing and not performing at the same time. The diarist knows the mirror is half-silvered.

I've just been perusing part of the diary of the Englishman Bruce Cummings who published 'The Journal of a Disappointed Man' under the name W.N.P. Barbellion just after the Armistice of the First World War, and died soon after at 30 from multiple sclerosis. He writes at different places:

I toss these pages in the faces of timid, furtive, respectable people and say: “There! that’s me! You may like it or lump it, but it’s true. And I challenge you to follow suit, to flash the searchlight of your self-consciousness into every remotest corner of your life and invite everybody’s inspection. Be candid, be honest, break down the partitions of your cubicle, come out of your burrow, little worm.” As we are all such worms we should at least be honest worms.

My confessions are shameless. I confess, but do not repent. The fact is, my confessions are prompted, not by ethical motives, but intellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self-investigator.

Verily I lead a curious double existence: among most people, I pass for a complaisant, amiable, mealy-mouthed, furry if conceited creature. Here I stand revealed as a contemptuous, arrogant malcontent.

But these rather bombastic bits are less interesting than the intimate confidences which come across like boys saying to each other: I've shown you mine, what about yours? Only it's oblique, implied. Here's my inner life...

I have already enjoyed some acquaintance with this man, and look forward to further. But I do want to reach inside the entries and shake him, respond to his provocations and pleadings, be a friend. That option is not available. 

He wrote, just before he died:

And at the end of my little excursion into memory I cam e upon the morning when I put some sanded, opaque bits of jelly, lying on the rim of the seas into a glass collecting jar, and to my amazement and delight they turned to Ctenophors--alive, swimming, and iridescent! You must imagine a tiny soap bubble about the size of a filbert with four series of plates or combs arranged regularly on the soap bubble from its north to its south pole, and flashing spasmodically in unison as they beat the water.

I'm reminded of my first amazing excursions through the microscope into the world of pond water. I hear you.