We have talked the 5-year-old into keeping a casual diary of sorts, and, while it’s so fun to see his days summarized in his little hyphenated paragraphs, it’s also really surprising, too. For instance, we’d thought that he had a terrible time on the day mentioned above! He moped around and complained about the heat and all the walking. It’s a reminder that if you have a kid who keeps things close to the chest, giving them tools to express themselves (in O’s case it’s Garageband on the iPad to write songs, or a pen and a nice notebook for a diary) gives you this whole different glimpse into who they are and what they’re feeling and thinking.
The summer muse
A diary collage made out of a guidebook from The Whitney
The best thing (cheerful retrospection)
When I write in my diary, I often try to start with Paul Chowder’s advice in the novel The Anthologist, paraphrased this way by author Nicholson Baker, and quoted in Steal Like An Artist:
If you ask yourself, ‘What’s the best thing that happened today?’ it actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pulls up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn’t otherwise think about. If you ask yourself, ‘What happened today?’ it’s very likely that you’re going to remember the worst thing, because you’ve had to deal with it–you’ve had to rush somewhere or somebody said something mean to you–that’s what you’re going to remember. But if you ask what the best thing is, it’s going to be some particular slant of light, or some wonderful expression somebody had, or some particularly delicious salad. I mean, you never know…
Sometimes the Best Thing is not even something I did, but something I watched or listened to:
Sometimes the Best Thing is a stretch:
And sometimes I can’t even come up with it:
Let them say it for you
When I’m writing in my diary I like to draw one of my memento mori comic characters and let them say the awful words floating in my brain.
I do this with many bad thoughts, especially my Bad Editor voice. (“This is terrible,” “you suck,” etc.)
It’s a silly little trick to get the thoughts out of my head and no longer feel any responsibility for them.
A wartime log
The New York Times ran an obituary today for Anthony Acevedo, who was a 20-year-old American medic when he was captured during the Battle of the Bulge. He was sent to a Nazi labor camp, and when the Red Cross sent him a care package with a diary and a fountain pen, he started keeping a diary of his time. (The diaries were produced by the YMCA in Geneva — inside reads: “A WARTIME LOG FOR BRITISH PRISONERS.”) The obituary notes that “risked his life by keeping his diary” but he felt “he had an obligation to maintain it.” “He hid the diary in his pants or under hay in the barracks.”
The Times ran this single page, but The United States Holocaust Museum has the whole diary digitized and available online. In addition to the grim details of Acevedo’s experience, there are several drawings:
Even some drawings from pinups in the back:
It’s amazing how just clicking through the digitized images, you get a feel for this diary as a book, an artifact. The Times notes, “The book, with its yellowing pages, became a sort of plaything at home, with crayon scribblings by his children on the last page.” Those scribblings don’t seem to be included in the museum’s scan, unfortunately, but they reminded me of how Charles Darwin’s children doodled on the original manuscript for On the Origin of Species, and how the Hawthorne children scribbled in Sophia and Nathaniel’s marriage diary:
I should note, there are several other diaries in the Holocaust Museum’s archives. I’ve saved a search for digitized diaries in English here.
Searching for “Wartime log,” I found another (illustrated) wartime log by Wally Layne drawn in the same style of YMCA book. (I wonder how many soldiers were inspired to keep a diary just by receiving those packages from the Red Cross?) And, of course, now I’m thinking of this WWII poster, from 1942:
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