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Chronological
listing of Diary entries:
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The prelude
The diary's role
The diary- then and now
My own experience
What Web Diary has for you
Disclaimer
The prelude
In Hamlet the wisdom comes at last - 'life is a tale told by an idiot….signifying nothing'. Unfortunately the Bard has been quoted more often than not out of context, so that not only life, but this very saying comes to mean nothing. Yet how often we are fond of saying that life is crazy, life is bogus, life is meaningless, life is puzzling, life is this, life is that…and what not! We find ourselves in a Hamlet like dilemma in trying to unravel what life and its aspects mean. Recently I have been reading
In Memoriam. This rather long collection of poems by the most famous poet of the Victorian world touches many themes, topics, and tries to treat life's many metaphysical problems in an apparently philosophical vein. It's a rather different (and controversial) thing that the attempt fails at many places, but as the poet himself assures us, it's not the prophet like finality that is important, but the honest and innocent
doubtings, questionings that is important. That such an attempt has been made to make more sense of the puzzle called life is an occasion for congratulation, at least in the sense that this attempt tries to bring us out of our idiocy. At the end of the poem the poet is looking ahead, and faithfully waiting for a higher race of men who would be spiritually superior to us human beings, and the true inheritors of the human legacy- quite like the Superman of Shaw. It would be an idiotic presumption on my part to betray the spectre of intellectual absurdity as portrayed by Beckett in, say,
Waiting for Godot (a play which makes little sense to most people, and to the few people who claim to be better than idiots, it means whatever the claimant wants it to mean- perhaps here is the greatest absurdity!). But yes, if there is one word which can describe life better in most circumstances, it is 'absurd' (and here it becomes easier to understand why such a little understood play as mentioned above can become so popular). So, I begin with the proposition that is life is basically absurd (please don't try to synthesize my statements to the
Theory of the Absurd- that would be really absurd), and as such any absurdity on my part should be accepted as legitimate
behaviour.
The diary's role
A diary is a confession. A diary is a friend (and literally so in a rather famous diary called
The Diary of Ann Frank). A diary is a companion. A diary is a witness. A diary is an archive. A diary is a record. A diary is a nostalgia. A diary is a past. A diary is a spiritual sustenance. And a diary is a lot more. We have Robinson Crusoe, that myth of humanity which is understood in all cultures and at all times, showing us what a potent weapon the diary can be. While rather dry in its actuality, the diary is moral regeneration by implication. And while strictly by a diary we mean a running commentary on one's personal life in present continuous tense, a diary can be retrospective in essence. This liberal definition would include a whole gamut of literature within the purview of a diary. Thus, any autobiographical narration becomes a diary- and really it is.
In Memoriam has been called a diary by none other than
T.S.Eliot, that intellectual giant of the modern Western society who had a knack of looking beyond the superficiality of life, and getting at its depth. We look at
Ulysses, and see what a mammoth confession it is- the diary of one single day which lays open a whole world, a whole age, a whole culture.
In its role as a friend, consoler, companion the diary as a vehicle is really potent. After facing all the tragedy of the world, dipping into the controlled confines of a diary provides a unique comfort (something which Tennyson says again in
In Memoriam). The tears dry up, the sobbing
subsides, and the cold of the night overtakes us. Waking up in the morning, we just hope that the world is a little brighter place. While we are happy, the diary provides us that one person who is always delighted to hear us. And who is always there to take us back to the ecstasy at our beck and call. Of course this personification betrays a little sentimentality, but once you are in the habit of diary writing, once you fall in love with your diary, you will accept this charge of sentimentality with a smiling face.
The diary- then and now
Until now the diary was something which you wrote at your leisure and solitude, and which you hid behind your books or in your cupboard. But the coming of the computer and the internet has changed the diary writing habit in more ways than one. I will first go through the differences that has come about due to the coming of the desktop computer (and your favourite word processing software), and then I shall try to understand how the web diary differs essentially from the traditional diary.
The first aspect of the difference is something which is much broader, and does not pertain to diary writing solely, but pertains to softcopy (software copy) and hard copy (handwritten paper copy) in general. Writing diary on the computer has many advantages: it is faster (provided you know typing), it is safer and more private (you can hide your writings more easily, and more
safely), it is easier to copy and edit, and do whatever you want to do with it (such as, suppose you want to write an autobiography, and you want to add excerpts from your diary- all you need to do now is copy and paste the relevant portions from your diary document to your autobiography document), and so on.
It's unimaginable how much more comfortable it is to deal with diary entries once a competent database is made of them. And if you are really interested in doing something serious with your diary entries (such as you want to write a novel based on your memoirs, or you want to write your memoirs, or you want to do research on someone else's diary, or you want simply to make a psychoanalytical analysis of your writings), you should first of all transfer all your data to the computer. Period.
But this is all banal talk, and harps about how a computer is more advantageous compared to the humble pen and paper. Let's talk of something much more interesting and puzzling. Why is it that a person is so intent upon making his intimate confessions public to utter strangers over the internet, when in an earlier age he was so much more intent on only hiding his diary? Why indeed!
Some months back I read a book on the internet called Creative Content for the
Web, by Marc Millon. Millon provides a very valid argument. Making your thoughts known to a complete stranger is not
a liability. In a different context and essay, Shaw sarcastically comments that writing an autobiography was not possible for him. If he wrote anything against a person he knew, he would have to spend the rest of his life in mortal fear. The only way around this problem would be to wait for all acquaintances to die so that there would be nobody to contradict or sue him. But in that case the very object of writing the autobiography would be gone, now that there was nobody to care for him a bit. When you are writing a diary you are essentially a stranger to everyone except yourself. And for that matter anyone peeping between your lines is a stranger. But a complete stranger is totally unacquainted with you, and he is a more probable source of sympathy. Ironically in many web diaries this warning is
displayed:if you know me, please exit this site and do not read my
diary.
My own experience
I too have had my experience of diary writing. For three long and consecutive years I slogged every night to fill a whole page in my rather small handwriting. Of course life back then was much more happening (the other pasture is always greener), and there was so much to write. And yet it
invariably happened that on some days there was much more to write than other- and I had only one page to fill. Coming to a balance calls for a certain artistry (something I wouldn't have had to do had I a computer to put my thoughts into), and three years gave me that. Having read a rather melancholy novel
by Thomas Hardy (The Mayor of Casterbridge), I attained a similar morbidity in my writing (something which was conscious in the beginning, but
became habitual soon enough). At one point of time I was confident enough of writing a novel by myself (a still unattained goal). And for three long years a certain regularity
attended my nightly activities. Without filling those indispensable lines in my diary at the end of the day life seemed incomplete. And the diary entry was a part of my life. Unfortunately the happening times tapered off and study pressures and the a rather boring college life provided less and less stuff for brooding.
The computer provided me the opportunity to write scattered notes on life, incidents and persons. I frolicked with these notes. I wrote and deleted them. They seemed
so easy, so frivolous than the hardcopy diary. If you want to destroy the memories of an unsavoury past, with a softcopy all you had to do was press the
delete button. With the hardcopy you could be so much more dramatic- tearing off page by page and throwing them into a raging fire…from ashes to ashes….But for better or for worse, computer has become so much a part of my life. Life has become so much more comfortable with the computer. I might miss that old charm that was there in spending waking hours
over a red resin covered diary, but I welcome the beauty, the order and the competence of a computer.
What
Web Diary has for you
These entries are not so much diary entries as perhaps personal articles on various topics, especially those touching my life. The old intimacy of the diary which would hold all the intimate confessions is not to be expected. Confessions are confided, not displayed. And on the internet there is no way of verifying who the reader is.
Disclaimer
Web Diary purports to
comment on real incidents and real characters.
While making mention of real characters, proper
care would be taken to prevent their identities
from getting explicit. As a matter of policy, I
would never use the name of a character in a
disparaging context. In a moment of
congratulation, or praise, I might use a person's
name (perhaps even without the person's
permission), with the belief that such mention
would not be met with the person's censure. If
your name has been mentioned in any diary entry
which you want deleted, please write to me with
your request at [email protected]
at the earliest. Since I would desist from using
names I escape all charges of defamation. Thank
you.
Written:
19 December, 2001 |
