People And Things
By HAROLD NICOLSON RECEIVED the other day a letter from the editor of a I Paris newspaper in which he asked me two questions. The first question was " Did I still keep a diary?"......
I Thus Come Back To The Point At Which I
started, the proposition put to me by my French enquirer. Men of action keep diaries in order to give a spurious sense of ful- filment to their daily inefficacy. Men of genius......
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......
Conversely, The Introspective Diary, Although It May Be A...
of literature, is not in the exact sense a diary at all ; it is an autobiographical confession in the way that the masterpieces of Rousseau and St. Augustine were auto-......
Few People, I Suppose, Would Contend That The Pleasure We
extract from Pepys, Evelyn, the de Goncourts, Greville, or Colonel Repington is a literary pleasure. I am not con- vmced even that it is a very reputable pleasure. The purely......
Can It Really Be Maintained That This Theory Applies To
the great diaries of the past? Is it really true that all diaries have been written as a solace for ineffectiveness or as a sub- stitute for creative energy? Pepys and John......
What Therefore Are We To Say Of Those Diaries Which
have been left to us by men of unquestioned creative genius? One thinks at once of Swift's Puma! to Stella, and of the short but brilliant diary which Byron kept at Ravenna. It......
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