There are two reviews in the latest New York Review of Books on diaries and journals. One concerns Jimmy Carter's release of his diaries from his White House years. The other is the publication by the Library of America of an edition in two volumes of Ralph Waldo Emerson's massive private journals (the actual journals, according to the reviewer, comprise 40 thick volumes; the two under review, covering a span of 57 years, come out combining the two volumes, to around 2,000 pages). Carter's diaries, despite the headline-grabbing "revelation" that he and the late-Sen. Edward Kennedy clashed over health care reform, is revealing not just of this particular dispute. Carter had pretty solid, yet succinct, opinions on all sorts of people, from German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to the late Sens. Scoop Jackson and Frank Church. Mining the wealth of detail, the reviewer concludes that, in many ways, Carter has become his own worst enemy, not least by publishing these diaries. He also recently shot himself in the foot (which was embedded in his mouth, no mean feat) by declaring that his was the best post-Presidency career of all. That this has often been remarked upon is true enough; that he was un-humble enough to agree with this assessment says much about the character of the man.
Emerson's journals in many ways appear similar to Carter's. Rich in detail, precise and unflagging in his opinions on people and events (the young Emerson dismisses a small group of English Romantics, including Coleridge, even as one is hard pressed to discover differences between Romanticism and much of Emerson's pantheistic, individualist notions of human possibility), reveals both the sorrow at a series of deaths that occurred in a span of a few short years - his young wife's, two brothers, his son - and the ensuing heroic, monumental efforts to overcome that grief and continue to affirm the basic goodness not just of humanity, but the entire Universe. One can speculate on whether this was an act of self-delusion, an example of a powerful will and intellect integrating the events of his life with his vision of an ordered, loving universe, or the maundering thoughts of a borderline sociopath Yet, the sheer volume of his private thoughts makes any simplistic reduction of this complex individual impossible.
I used to keep a journal. I started the summer after my freshman year in college, as an attempt to come to terms with a relationship gone horribly wrong. I also took the opportunity to reflect on events in the larger world. I have kept these journals, written in spiral notebooks, but am now thinking again about whether or not they should be kept around. In the case of Carter, it seems that publishing his detailed account of his far-too hands-approach to the Presidency reveals him to be an individual capable of an interpersonal pettiness that emerged in his public life in his far-too-revealing 1979 speech scolding the American people for a failure of spirit, known for a word - "malaise" - that never actually appeared in the speech. It is possible to reveal far too much of oneself, particularly if one is still around to hear critics gasp in wonder at one's faults.
The original "blogs", or web logs, were little more than on-line journals. Some of the best I still read are exactly that. Even my own is little more than that, and considering the limitations of the genre it is surprise that anyone thinks they can be much more than that. It is this more than anything that lends a certain credence to critical dismissal of even the best political blogs as nothing more than the muddled musings of persons ill-equipped to do serious analytical reflection on our current events.
We now come to the crux of the issue at the heart of the whole journaling/blogging enterprise. Even the most impersonal writings open up critics to the question of identity. "Who are you that we should heed your words?" is the most basic question posed to any authority. Even those bog writers who admit their identity in public (more common now than in the past) find themselves facing this critical question, usually countered by demanding an attention to the substance of their work. Yet, no writing gains authority apart from the acceptance of the authority of the person who wrote it. On the one hand, it is possible to consider any piece of writing "on the merits". Doing so, however, makes of any writing something unreal. A person wrote this or that. A person with a point of view, a background, educated or not, informed or not, that lends credibility to that writing, or detracts from it.
Until recently, journaling was an attempt by individuals to forge an identity, to question their identity, so they could then move out in to public without needing to reveal their inner struggle. Now, that sphere of privacy has been eradicated. Identity is no longer forged in the precinct of the private. On the contrary, it is becoming part of our larger culture of public display. Whether it is the antics of "reality TV" - which is no more "real" than scripted television - or the proliferation of blogs dealing with an individual's sex life, drinking consumption, relationships with family, we no longer even consider it necessary to keep parts of our lives from public scrutiny. Getting input from people on how we live our lives is part of our culture now. Even an octogenarian like Carter has succumbed, seeing in the publication a possibility for public vindication (which has gone very badly wrong). Emerson's journals, on the other hand, reveal that the man behind the essays and sermons and pamphlets and occasional writings struggled to live out his own creed, could be both magnanimous and petty, and rounds out an understanding of him as a human being who understood that part of being human, being an individual, is best forged in fires behind closed doors.
Virtual Tin Cup
