None But Eagles

I didn’t intend to start reading two books in diary form — I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf — in the same week I started writing a diary again myself, but so it happened. I didn’t know the former was written as a diary until I started it, and I thought of the latter as a record of the process of literary reading and writing, not so much the “baby talk” as that quote I posted a month ago has it.

Woolf wrote at first on loose pages (the first sentence of the first entry: “While waiting to buy a book in which to record my impressions […] I had better write them here”) and later in bound books. In I Capture the Castle, Cassandra speed-writes her way through exercise books. I write mine on my laptop, since my handwriting is slow and messy and I didn’t want to dignify my baby talk with physical paper. The downside is that although a laptop is portable it nonetheless limits one’s scope — it takes up most of one’s field of vision (at least that which I can see — there is always a blurry peripheral world beyond the lens of my glasses) and tends to cause overheating. And I am jealous of Cassandra’s point of view from the kitchen sink.

I also bought a planner yesterday — bright yellow cover, wire binding, one week per spread with only the days of the week specified, with pockets for loose papers and blank pages in the back — to aid in keeping better organized for the coming school year and to avoid forgetting quite as much as I already have. Time that passes without a diary or a day planner (or photos) often gets forgotten. So when I don’t have time to write in the diary, at least there will be some kind of list of what I did or should have done.