Dear Diary, today I did the naughtiest thing...
Oh, the illicit thrill of reading an uncensored diary entry. Surely, there can be no better way to know a person than through their secret musings, in their own hand.
"Please read my diary, look through my things and figure me out," said Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, who died in 1994. His posthumously published journals - filled with doodles and lists - offer a fascinating insight into the mind of a gentle, tortured soul.
Whether it is used simply to record upcoming engagements or to share confessions, despite advances in technology the paper diary refuses to die. In this, National Diary Week, retailers including Staples and Amazon have reported steady growth of sales in recent years.
In his poetry collection Book of Longing, Leonard Cohen wrote: "Dear Diary/I mean no disrespect/But you are more sublime/Than any Sacred Text/Sometimes just a list/Of my events/Is holier then the Bill of Rights/And more intense."
For social historians, the diary is an invaluable record of the daily minutiae interwoven with seismic, historical events, and their power is potent.
"It's an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary," wrote Anne Frank, "not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I - nor for that matter anyone else - will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl." How her heart would have skipped if only she'd known.
Famed diarist Samuel Pepys was witness to many events that altered history including the Great Fire of London, of which he wrote: "... poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats ... And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down."
The internet has allowed bloggers, campaigners, lonely souls and exponents of niche interests and specialist passions to connect, share, advise and inform.
For reaching out to those living in the same time, the internet is an invaluable tool, but these pages of history that are being recorded digitally, will we be able to read them in 20 years time?
They'd give an insight into life in 2014, but will anyone be able to access them in 50 years? Or 400? I'm not convinced.
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