Diaries

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Title:     Diaries
Author: Israel Zangwill [More Titles by Zangwill]

Who is the most marvellous man? He who keepeth a diary. And by keeping a diary I mean keeping it for the whole year, from January 1st to December 31st--keeping it, moreover, by daily entry. Only one year in my life did I succeed in filling up every department of the three hundred and sixty-five, and even then I was often in arrears. Diaries are for those who lead cloistral lives and pure, so that the task is trivial, and whatsoever record of their own leap to light they shall not be shamed. Diaries are not for those whose existence is a whirlpool; for such the blank page is an added perturbation, a haunting whiteness beseeching the blackness of diurnal autobiography, an I O U that calls for instant satisfcation. To the spontaneous vexings of conscience has been added an artificial pricking at the neglect of a supererogatory duty. How have I blonched to see day adding itself to day, unrecorded, time flying without being "kodak'd" on the wing; and each new neglect retarding the day of reckoning even while it aggravated it! Then have I felt myself sinking beneath the self-imposed

Yoke, intolerable, not to be borne
Of the too vast orb of my fate,

yearning for a smaller circumference and a shorter biography. At the outset one begins a diary, as one practises a new virtue, or plays with a new toy--enthusiastically. For the first few days of January the entries are rich in psychological and episodical matter. Then gradually the interest trails off; to the fertile plains of narrative and analysis succeeds a barren desert, relieved only by a few dates of appointments. With Mark Twain it will be remembered the entries were reduced to "Got up, washed, went to bed." The keeping of a diary is generally the first New Year resolution to be broken. How eloquent these old diaries filled up for a month or two--and the rest silence!

On second thoughts there is a more marvellous than the most marvellous man. It is he who keepeth a pecuniary diary. I know one such. He has kept a perfect and absolutely complete record of every farthing he has laid out since the days when farthings were his standard of currency. Which of us would dare do this, or, doing, would dare cast a backward glance on the financial past? There is a crude, relentless actuality about items of expenditure, not to be softened by euphemistic phrasing. Surely a truer proverb than any of its species would be: "Tell me what you buy, and I'll tell you what you be." And to think, in reviewing your pecuniary biography, that, though you owe no man a farthing, you have still to pay the bill; that many things you have bought have yet to be paid for "over and over again," as the Master Builder said, "over and over again."

[The end]
Israel Zangwill's essay: Diaries

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