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Why do so many people keep a diary? Do people write for themselves or in hope others will eventually read it? It is a way to remember our lives, connect to God, can keeping a diary become an addiction?
Poet Norbert Bugeja from Malta and German writer Thorsten Becker today shared their diaries and thoughts on one of the world’s most continuous and oldest forms of written word.
Norbert keeps a diary in the form of poems. He writes in the evening, every evening, and according to him “it is like an addiction”.
Thorsten picks and presses flowers, finds pictures, uses a typewriter that he carries with him all around the world and listens to the same cd while collating each and every single page.
Why do people keep diaries? If I don’t write my diary, said Thurston, I don’t really feel good.
“It’s become a necessity, and so has the flower collecting. I can’t understand writers that don’t use flowers.”
“Start collecting flowers today,” Thurston suggested, “press them well, it’s a very nice hobby.”
The panelists talked not of just expressing oneself through a diary, but of being able to have the world serve as your healer. The diary can allow us to be dishonest with ourselves, making ourselves believe the fictions we want to believe, it allows us to put ideas out into the ether, with only the world or God, whomever you desire, listening.
Norbert spoke of human inconsistency. Diaries, according to him, are a way to even out the human head. “Balancing bags of loneliness” was a line Norbert read out to the crowd from one of his poems.
Thurston uses his diary to preserve memory, and writes only for himself, “if you’re writing for other people there’s no use in writing a diary.”
But do our panelists want their diaries published one day…well yes of course, both do. The world has fallen in love with published diaries, and even though both of our panelists are writing primarily for themselves, they both hope one day to make money from their efforts…and I suppose that’s the main difference between professional writers and us normal folk.
We all keep a diary first and foremost for ourselves, but there are some of us that hope to make a buck out if it at the end of the day.
By Clare Price
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