Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Some deep old desk

Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary on April 20, 1919 at age 37:

"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, 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 & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced . . .

The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of 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, & found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time."

From The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume I: 1915-1919, edited by Anne Olivier Bell

Additional journal excerpts:
C.S. Lewis
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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