ABSTRACT
The writing of a diary can be attributed to various promptings—curiosity, vanity, anxiety, a need for self-expression; but underlying all of them is the desire, implicit in any imaginative literary undertaking, to record what for the writer is “the truth,” by describing, and to that extent controlling, the flux of daily sensations and impressions. To keep a diary not only nails time down, it assumes the diarist's power to set time in order. But, through the substantiation of some memories and the correction of others, a diary is a reminder that this ordering of time is only provisional. Memory has editors; social conditioning, heredity and temperament all determine what is recalled. Yet just as the process of recollection can be opened up through psychoanalysis, or modulated through religious conversion, so it can, through the impulse towards autobiography, attain to the objective status of an art.
