I've never kept a journal –– or rather, I've never known if I ought to keep one. Sometimes, I begin one, and then, quite quickly, drop it –– and yet, later on, I begin again. It's a light, intermittent desire, lacking in seriousness or doctrinal substance. I think I can diagnose this "disease" of the diary: an insoluble doubt in the value of what one writes there.
This doubt is insidious: a doubt-in-delay. At first, when I make a (daily) entry, I sense a certain pleasure: it's simple, easy. I don't struggle to find what to say: the material is there, at once; it's like an surface mine; I need only to bend down; I don't have to transform anything; the crude has its own value, etc. In the second phase, closely following the first (for example, if I reread today what I wrote yesterday), it makes a bad impression: the text doesn't keep, like a delicate food which "turns," goes bad, becomes unappetizing from one day to the next; I'm discouraged to find the artifice of "sincerity", the artistic mediocrity of "spontaneity": worse yet, I disgust and irritate myself by having taken a "pose" which I never wanted to take: in the context of the journal, and precisely because it doesn't "work" (isn't transformed by the action of work), I is a poseur: a question of effect, not of intention, the whole difficulty of literature is there. Almost immediately, continuing my rereading, I'm annoyed by these verbless phrases ("Couldn't sleep. Already the third in a row," etc.), or phrases in which the verb is carelessly shortened ("Passed two young girls in the Place St-S.") –– and try as I might to restore the decency of a complete form ("I passed...,"I couldn't sleep"), the matrix of every journal, namely the reduction of the verb, lingers in my ear and gets on my nerves like an old, tired refrain. In the third phase, if I reread my journal pages several months, or several years, after having written them, although doubt still arises, I feel a certain pleasure in recalling, thanks to these pages, the events they relate and, even more, the inflections (of light, of atmosphere, of mood) they cause me to relive. In short, at this point, no literary interest (other than problems of formulation, that is to say, of phrasing), but a kind of narcissistic attachment (weakly narcissistic: no need to exaggerate) to my affairs (whose reminiscence doesn't fail to be ambiguous, since to remember is also to take note of and to lose a second time what will never return). But, once again, does this final indulgence, reached after having crossed over a phase of rejection, justify (systematically) keeping a journal? Is it worth it?
This doubt is insidious: a doubt-in-delay. At first, when I make a (daily) entry, I sense a certain pleasure: it's simple, easy. I don't struggle to find what to say: the material is there, at once; it's like an surface mine; I need only to bend down; I don't have to transform anything; the crude has its own value, etc. In the second phase, closely following the first (for example, if I reread today what I wrote yesterday), it makes a bad impression: the text doesn't keep, like a delicate food which "turns," goes bad, becomes unappetizing from one day to the next; I'm discouraged to find the artifice of "sincerity", the artistic mediocrity of "spontaneity": worse yet, I disgust and irritate myself by having taken a "pose" which I never wanted to take: in the context of the journal, and precisely because it doesn't "work" (isn't transformed by the action of work), I is a poseur: a question of effect, not of intention, the whole difficulty of literature is there. Almost immediately, continuing my rereading, I'm annoyed by these verbless phrases ("Couldn't sleep. Already the third in a row," etc.), or phrases in which the verb is carelessly shortened ("Passed two young girls in the Place St-S.") –– and try as I might to restore the decency of a complete form ("I passed...,"I couldn't sleep"), the matrix of every journal, namely the reduction of the verb, lingers in my ear and gets on my nerves like an old, tired refrain. In the third phase, if I reread my journal pages several months, or several years, after having written them, although doubt still arises, I feel a certain pleasure in recalling, thanks to these pages, the events they relate and, even more, the inflections (of light, of atmosphere, of mood) they cause me to relive. In short, at this point, no literary interest (other than problems of formulation, that is to say, of phrasing), but a kind of narcissistic attachment (weakly narcissistic: no need to exaggerate) to my affairs (whose reminiscence doesn't fail to be ambiguous, since to remember is also to take note of and to lose a second time what will never return). But, once again, does this final indulgence, reached after having crossed over a phase of rejection, justify (systematically) keeping a journal? Is it worth it?
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