Brain Food #444
On keeping a diary
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
Keeping a personal diary, whether a written or visual one, is especially important when the world is going through historically significant moments. Allegedly, it will take another 30 years or so for the events of this period to enter history books. Assuming the internet will still be around, historians will have plenty of documentation from newspapers, video clips and more to retrace events, but it is usually what happens between news articles that adds texture to history: the personal tragedies, successes and acts of inspiration, that truly capture what it meant to live through this.
Capturing events, or in the lack of events, the mere passing of time, whether through words or images, helps us process them, but also adds a personal touch to a world that seems to have forgotten about us.
Moments are memories, and our collective memory is defined by our individual recollections. If anything, a diary might help us remember how we changed, but also how we resisted. It will help us be remembered. Or it will just help us get a little closer to understanding the incomprehensible.
“As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view...”
— Virginia Woolf
Pages from Anne Frank’s diary