Why keep a journal?

Diary, journal, memoir, chronicle, first hand account. Why on earth would anyone bother with such a trivial pursuit as to list what one had for breakfast, what the weather was like, or how much it costs to purchase necessary groceries for the week?

Who cares about this kind of detail when we’re all living it right now anyway?

As part of my writing journey, I began keeping a journal. There are days when I shudder to think of what someone in the future would find within those pages, but they’d have to be capable of reading what will likely become dead media sooner rather than later because they’re not hand written. I kept them on my hard-drive.

So much history gets lost because it’s never written down and even then, it seems like it’s only the grocery lists, cargo manifests and the boring minutiae that survive through the ages. To find out what life was like in another time, you have to go to more amateur sources and rely upon diaries written at the time.

In surfing one day, I found a blog dedicated to reproducing, in real time, the Diary of Samuel Pepys (rhymes with “peeps” – silly Brits and their odd spellings/pronunciations). The diary begins in January of 1660 and has been accumulating once more since 2003.

His diaries are considered the most famous first-hand account of life in mid-seventeenth century. Written in shorthand, his journals provide us with a detailed account of the life of a young man engaged in important public service. Pepys was a high-level bureaucrat in the English government who witnessed major changes in government, a devastating outbreak of the plague, the Great Fire, and a war with Holland.

It’s an interesting read, especially to see how our use of the English language has changed in the last 350 years, but I find I can’t read much at a time. However, once you begin looking at the names and events mentioned, Samuel Pepys certainly lived in interesting times and rubbed shoulders with very influential men.

Do I think my own journal entries will ever be of any interest to others? Highly doubtful, as if whining about how I can’t stay focused, the terrors of dealing with tween angst, or rambling on about how I think a story should or shouldn’t be working and what I thought or some other published writer’s work waxing philosophical about the same types of questions would be of use to anyone else.

I guess the real question is, did Samuel Pepys realize what he was writing at the time?