Yet what a solace is the diary habit to those
lesser mortals who lead eventful but ineffective lives! The day passes in a whirl of distraction, telephones and taximeter cabs. History, during those sixteen hours, has jigged a few inches further upon the ticker-tape of time. And thus when one returns at midnight to the stillness of one's room, as one draws the type- writer towards one and records the incidents of the past hours, one acquires a small but comforting sense of com- pletion, if not of achievement ; and the frustration, incom- petence and wastage of one's day is in some degree mitigated. Those sixteen hours are closed, docketed, labelled ; they slip into the file ; the mere tabulation of ineffectiveness renders ineffectiveness less galling ; and one slides into sleep com- forted by the thought that activities, however ill-planned they may have been, are by these means given at least some semblance of the methodical. "Dieu!" one exclaims, " que la vie est quotidienne!" Knowing well enough that is nothing of the sort.
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