I ran across the Diary of Hannah Pierce, a Friend who lived in the early 18th century. Much of it is traditional daybook: what she did that day; whom she saw. Then she'll burst out with a discourse, like this:

She also writes poetry, especially about death. More and more, her entries are taken up with death until in the last decade, nearly all the entries record deaths. Just one line entries.

Several times in the late 1830s she mentions attending anti-slavery lectures, but despite that and her preoccupation with death, her only mention of the US Civil war is a sentence about a young man in the army, part of a family she knew, who died in Lexington. That struck me as strange until I checked to see where she lived: up in NY and Michigan: safe. No Virginia (or southern woman at all, maybe) would have written a diary of those years without the war figuring on just about every page. Makes me think about how little the wars in other parts of the world occupy my thoughts. I try not to cocoon myself against the suffering that's going on, but the immediacy isn't there.

Nevertheless... because we need cheer, too, here's something for spring, from 1840, when she was 33:

From IHT:

Mumbai: G.P. Sawant never charged the prostitutes for his letter-writing services.
Not long after the women would descend on this swarming, chaotic city, they would find him at his stall near the post office, this letter writer for the unlettered. They often came hungry, battered and lonely, needing someone to convert their spoken words into handwritten letters to mail back to their home villages.
The letters ferried false reassurances. The women claimed in them that they had steady jobs as shopkeepers and Bollywood stage hands. Saying nothing of the brothels, beatings and rapes, they enclosed money orders to remit home rupees agonizingly acquired. Many called Sawant brother and tied a string on his wrist each year in the Hindu tradition.
Sometimes, suspicious parents would board a train to Mumbai and turn up at Sawant's stall, which a daughter had listed as her address. Sawant greeted them kindly but revealed nothing about the woman's work or whereabouts.
Such is the letter writer's honor code: When you live by writing other people's letters, you die with their secrets.

Mr. Sawant's business itself has mostly died, though. His former customers can now communicate faster and more privately with mobiles and text messaging. (His story has a happy ending: his children are prospering.)

This vanishing art of letter writing, of keeping so many secrets, is fascinating: stories in stories.

The video accompanying the story is worth watching, for seeing Mr. Sawant's expressions and body language, and where he works. Does it replace the written story? I don't think so. But it depends on how much and what kind of information you want.

full story

My friend Bill has transcribed some of his mom's diary entries into a blog. It's very different from our diaries, or journals as we prefer to call them. It evokes nostalgia, an occasional bit of horror (the toilet training), longing for the "good old days," along with a sigh of relief that some things have changed.

"My mother kept diaries from January 6, 1962 until that morning [when she died] in October, 1998. Her diaries were written for practical purposes, and provide a chronicle of the events of her days. Few feelings are expressed, if any, and you have to read between the lines to discern her emotions. She would often refer back to her diaries to confirm that the roof was replaced on this date, the taxes were paid on that date, the weather was sunny and warm or snowy and windy.

 "…. My mother stopped working when I was born in 1959, and my dad was a US Navy diver. My mother's first diary was presented to her on January 6, 1962, when her parents arrived for an extended stay with my mother while my dad was out of the country with the Navy. My grandmother kept a daily diary until her death also, and I guess she encouraged my mother to do the same.

"…. My mother seems unsure of what to write initially, but gradually gets into the rhythm of writing each day. It is simply a record of the day-to-day life of an average American housewife. …"

 My grandmother kept a diary (which my aunt has). It was similar to Bill's mother's, more a record of events, probably with the intention of being a memory theater, but she did editorialize more. I've only read a few of the entries. The one she wrote shortly before her wedding was something like, "Now I'm on my way to the land of love."