Saturday, July 31, 2010

What sort of diary....

Dominick Argento set parts of this entry as the opening movement (and returned to it in the final movement) of his brilliant Diary of Virginia Woolf, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975. It's the way I feel about this blog and my journal:


"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.”
Virginia Woolf


I hope to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself - and refined itself and coalesced as such deposits so mysteriously do - into a mould - transparent enough to reflect the light of our life.....

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