DIARIES AMONG DIARIES
Getting closer to others through one's own intimacy
“What can come from the encounter between two diary writers? Nothing less than the pages of a hybrid diary.”
(From Piero Morganti’s diary, 9 October 1988)
“I hate to be alone because when alone I feel about ten years old. (Timid, uncertain, ill-at-ease, plagued by doubts as to whether I have permission to do this or that.) When I’m with another person, I borrow adult status + self-confidence from the other.”
(from Susan Sontag’s diary, 26 March 1963)
In this chapter I talk about the feeling of bringing my Diary closer to someone else’s Diary in order to bring my intimacy and subjectivity alongside someone else’s, in order to place my individuality close to other individualities, in order not to feel alone and to make my existence flow alongside someone else’s.
It is almost as if the diary form were transformed into an epistolary genre. As though the diaries started by searching for interlocutors, as though the form went from being a monologue to a dialogue. Not a diary, but a diary alongside another diary. Trying to get closer to someone with oneself, trying to get one’s own interiority closer to another interiority through proximity, familiarity, similarity or even difference.
And that’s how my diary gradually came to become one with other diaries – a plurality of individual forms – through either assonance or dissonance. All at the same time, all alongside one another: not encompassing or prevaricating, but coexisting in a sort of compresence.
A MILITANT GESTURE
If by keeping a diary we mean cultivating an intimate and personal space, if by placing one diary next to another we mean feeling part of a collectivity while maintaining our own
singularity free in all of us, if we think that every individual in society should live according to his/her own inclinations and that for some these are expressed in taking charge of a space of solitude and depth, perhaps then we might go so far as to say that keeping a diary and introducing it to a community of diaries might paradoxically become a political act.
(Written in 2015. Modified in 2019)
