I'm reading Our Private Lives, a collection of journal excerpts from public people. There are a lot of professional writers in here, but also politicians, a cowgirl, an oil man, and so on.
I was reading Gerald Early's excerpt a few days before the election and came across this, about the 1984 presidential race:
Many blacks I talked to thought [Jesse] Jackson should not have capitulated in 1984 to Mondale which, in hindsight, would appear to anyone to have been an horrendous move guaranteed [...] to set back the possibility of a black seriously running for president for maybe another twenty years.
About twenty years later, here we are at last.
This, incidentally, is the reason to keep a journal. Because who knows, twenty years down the line you might be proved right about something and you can go around all day saying I told you so. And also it's cathartic, but whatever. Bragging rights!
I'd recommend this or any other published journal to anyone who wants to write a journal of their own. Seeing how someone can make their day-to-day lives interesting to a reader -- even when it seems quite uninteresting to the writer -- helps you put your own life in perspective. If you're uncomfortable focusing on your own thoughts and feelings, you can simply write down the things you see and hear each day, which helps you sort over the day's experiences and retain them.
This is not my diary.
