One more thing before I share with you some of my diary pages. There are more diaries than one: there is the standard notebook (with or without a lock, depending on one's age or modesty), then there is the photo album (or box, or envelopes - again depending on how neat you choose to be). There is your work (your to do lists and meeting schedules will tell you things if you revisit them sometime); there can be your blog -where you go cyberly-global and get Internet surfers to join you in your computer-recorded life. Then your own handwriting can be your diary - if you care, like me as an amateur graphologist, to scrutinise the way you've changed your i-dotting and t-crossing over time, and how you've built or lost or changed the energy in your writing style. For those fortunate who have one (or more), your child can be the most meaningful kind of diary that you'll ever have, provided you stop and reflect with your child - as opposed to merely feed, choose a school, organise vaccinations, and other essential but non-sufficient parent activities.
I have all those kinds of diaries. My notebooks date back from when I was ten years old. Don't be impressed by that as they are loosely organised with huge gaps in time. They mix text entries with photos, newspaper cuttings, pressed flowers and even a tooth (mine).
One apocryphal message from an early diary says that my favourite lunches happened when I, aged two, stumbled upon builders having their lunch break-eating salami and hunks of bread out of greasy newspaper wrappings. To my mother's despair I would walk up to them and ask for food. They always obliged, no matter how convincingly my mother would tell them that ėMy daughter has plenty of food at home but she never eats it.' My eating habits have improved since, I'm glad to say.
In school my absolutely best friend was a boy who would always arrive ahead of most kids, clean the blackboard with the sponge, take the chalk box out and then he would come to the school gate and meet and laugh with colleagues. He invariably used to carry my school bag into the classroom. I have not seen him since we changed school at 12, but I heard in disbelief that he 'changed', following all sorts of family difficulties. At one point he spent time in jail for rape. So much for the unintelligible in life.
I studied Chinese at university, which opened up the world for me. In the thick of our communist days I was able to travel. Admittedly, only through the safe lands of ideologically-kindred countries - from Romania to China, via Russia and Mongolia. I had a personal triumph over isolation and propaganda and the life-blooming revelation that different, distant people and cultures speak such extraordinary stories of shared values and human worth. In China I got (with enormous difficulty) a permit from the Beijing police to travel to DaTong, to see the mountain-carved Buddhas. It turned out that I saw the equally powerful local people who had not seen foreigners in their town square for about 15 years, when a French cultural delegation was government-chaperoned into the 'tourist area'. The man who spoke to us on behalf of the community was a geography teacher and knew everything about the physical world beyond their city walls. He told me about Romania's Danube Delta (which I had not visited) and about the Long March in China which cut through the most impossible and supposedly inaccessible forms of relief. A brilliant conversationalist, warm and with a great sense of humour. He told me I could have a special, albeit superficial, experience in asking the locals for a favour, so I asked about where I could buy a pair of socks as mine were drenched in rainwater. I got the directions and was accompanied to the shop by a group of about 100 persons who had gathered around us. I'll say that our group was quite a sight too: a blonde, two metre tall German boy, an American whose anti-rain gear was a plastic shopping bag with two holes for his eyes which made him look like a klansman, a fellow student from Nigeria who took the cake by allowing some Chinese kids to touch his wiry, close-cropped hair and we two girls, from Romania and Italy, who started out as foreign devils speaking Chinese and wearing Chinese clothes but eventually gained the admiration of the Chinese as we talked about food, long distance train journeys and why we loved China and how close our countries could be.
In that incredibly different place nothing was alien from what I knew. The people we met then left me with a powerful 'learning point': the human experience is shared. No political system, however constrictive, can defeat personal freedom and people can communicate across any apparent obstacle. If they want to.
As a 'grown up' now, I've been lucky in my work. Firstly in Romania's national library, among all kinds of cataloguing duties, I had the chance to read the original diary of a distinguished Romanian diplomat of the 1930-40s. I felt awkward, trespassing almost, because it was not one of those diaries that are written with publication in mind. I felt similarly uneasy but emotionally overwhelmed when I read the published personal correspondence between Eminescu and Micle, the love and despair letters. Unlike these, there are diaries which the authors write for the world to read and which may end up as fine pieces of world literature - like the diaries of Andre Gide, Oscar Wilde or Mihai Sebastian. Or fine, disturbing pieces of human experience like Anne Frank's diary or Shackleton's account of the expedition to Antarctica. Or Queen Victoria's amazingly detailed life-diary. I find these famous diaries extraordinary because they are creatively brilliant, give insight into an age that is not directly known to us, and make portraits of people we know from totally different angles that show the vulnerability as well as the strength that could live in all of us. Such diaries teach us to keep exploring and learning about life and our own journey.
