What time do ants go to bed
Do you keep a diary? I kept one almost daily during my teenage years. Somewhere in my loft they are packed in cardboard boxes, boxes they’ve been in for many years and successive lofts. I’m not sure why I keep them, since to read them again might be either embarrassing or dull. I don’t know which would be worse.
People don’t keep diaries now; they blog. Now everyone can read your diary, and although I’m not a blog reader (except of course the Sandstone ones….) I am led to understand that people put the most intimate details of their lives in them, broadcasting across the world their children’s misdeeds and their sex lives, as well as political and social views.
The point of a diary is to write what only you will read, recollecting one hopes in tranquillity the loves and fears and disasters of former times. That’s why you used to be able to buy diaries with locks on them, why we hid them under the mattress, why it was such a terrible thing if your mother caught sight of it. It is the secret self explored, it is the one friend who will not betray you.
There is a strange thing about reading even the most recent diary entries: in them we always seem young. Looking back, we feel more mature than the self who smudged the entry with tears, or scratched the page in anger. And yet, surely, at my age, that can hardly be true any more? I must have grown up as much as I’m ever going to. That is, somehow, quite a depressing thought.
Perhaps it is the very act of writing what we believe only we will see, the confessional trusting of the empty page, which makes us sound young and naive. That is why the diary must be private and unshared: it is our young and ardent self, still trying to make sense of the world, who writes there. As soon as you start writing for someone else – known or unknown, friend or foe – you try to sound grown up, you start to lie.
It is pouring with rain outside in the dark, so I know the ants will have gone to bed. If it were dry and fine, I might go out with a torch and look. When it was still daylight at ten, I used to see them milling about just in front of the doorstep. Only a few intrepid ones ever seemed able to climb up onto the step, so I just let them be, allowing them to carry on with their mysterious lives.
That was what struck me as I watched them. Quite suddenly, now and again, you become aware that some other living creature, which seemed to play a very small part in your life, is in fact living its own separate life, which has nothing to do with yours. I see it sometimes when one of my cats can be spied far down the garden in the long grass, just sitting, gazing at something invisible to humans. He is not part of my story: I am part of his.
That is why reading blogs is so disorientating. Suddenly there are millions of people out there with their own stories, their separate drama. I will stick with my diary; I need to feel I’m at the centre of the story. Perhaps it’s to give their lives a greater importance that people write out their daily experiences for the internet audience: look, here I am, I have a story to tell, I matter, I exist.
But getting replies from other people won’t do that, in the end. Telling the world proves nothing. We have to be able to communicate with ourselves. We have to be at the centre.
Somewhere in the long grass, the cat keeps watch in silence; somewhere under the front step, the ants are planning their tactics for tomorrow.
I noticed this about public and private writing when I decided I couldnt keep my diaries any more - like you, stowed away in boxes from day 1. They contained a mix of interesting dated stuff which would have made background for school stories and village stories (the reality, not improved into fiction)and many far too private comments about my reactions to other people, very cringe-making.
I far prefer writing a blog, where the writing is known to be public, and someone will read it. One has to be far more disciplined and thoughtful and reader-conscious.
My favourite diary story is that in a book about the Findlater sisters, novelists of Lochearnhead and Comrie, who were brought up in a manse. When their stepmother or grandmother died (I’m not sure exactly) her diaries were still there and so stifling and critical of everything and moralistic that no one could bear them, and the sisters rowed out onto Loch Earn and dumped the diaries overboard.
By Sally Evans on Tuesday 1st September 2009 at 12:11pm