When the Library of America published a two-volume selection of Emerson’s multi-volume journal in 2010 I had to have it. Had to. Not only because I could not afford to buy the complete set of something like ten volumes that Harvard published, but because I also loves me my Emerson (after all I have a cat named Waldo which is what Emerson went by among his friends). And in spite of splurging on both volumes right then, I haven’t started reading them until now.
Of course the LOA volume one begins at the beginning with Emerson’s first journal begun when he started at Harvard at the age of 17 in 1820. Emerson titled his early journals, “The Wide World.” I have read the complete first few years of his early journals before but I can’t find if I ever posted about them. No matter.
Emerson was 17, a bit of a romantic and very silly. Quite the contrast from the sober man of his famous essays. He begins his journal by invoking the aid of witches and fairies:
O ye witches assist me! enliven or horrify some midnight lucubration or dream (whichever may be found most convenient) to supply this reservoir when other resources fail. Pardon me Fairy Land! rich region of fancy & gnomery, elvery, sylphery, & Queen Mab! pardon me for presenting my petition to your enemies but there is probably one in the chamber who maliciously influenced me to what is irrevocable; pardon & favor me! – & finally Spirits of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, wherever ye glow, whatsoever you patronize, whoever you inspire, hallow, hallow, this devoted paper.
And this is only the first entry. When he has been remiss about writing in his journal he asks for the fairies to forgive him. And, in one entry a month later he spins a fancy Arthurian daydream.
I can’t help but giggle. But I can’t giggle too much. I have incriminating diaries too. Here is my very first one:
A Shooting Star is a Sign of Happiness
It begins on February 24, 1978. I was ten. I have no recollection what the occasion was since it was too far away from Christmas and my birthday was a little over a month in the future. Unfortunately I wrote it mostly in pencil that is now terribly fading. But there is this single entry in bright green marker:
I’m not subtly flipping you off, promise
It is the next to last entry in the book. The first week of the diary I wrote every day. Then a week goes by before another entry. Then a couple weeks. Then a spread of a few weeks between entries. The green marker entry in May is followed by an entry dated September. So much for diary-keeping.
It wasn’t my last diary though. I have several half-finished diaries before it managed to become a habit. At seventeen, it was a habit and so I thought I’d pull out that diary to compare to Emerson’s. I was smug, I would NEVER invoke fairies. Are you kidding me? Get real. My smugness quickly turned to chagrin when I say the cover of the diary I began the day after my seventeenth birthday in 1985:
No fairies here, just a unicorn on the cover
Yup, that’s a velveteen cover embossed with a silver unicorn.
To my credit though I just dove right into writing about my birthday the day before. Thank goodness both my handwriting and my spelling improved over the years:
Birthdays deserve lots of exclamation points!!!!!
While my diary has no invocation to fairies and witches, I did give it an epigraph:
From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes, and I mean to make the most of my chance.
Of course I neglected to provide attribution for the quote. A Google search says it is from Chrisopher Morley’s Philadelphia. I have not read it so I suppose I copied it from some other source, probably Reader’s Digest which my mom had a subscription to and in which I loved to read the jokes and the inspirational quotes. I was big on inspirational quotes as a teenager.
I can’t laugh at 17-year-old Emerson as much as I’d like without also laughing at my 17-year-old self. Perhaps it just goes to show that 17-year-olds aren’t that different across the years.
You are a brave woman! I shudder at the very thought of exposing my 17-year-old diary to the world. I can’t bear to even look at them myself. I found my diary from when I was 13 a couple of years ago in my parents and after skimming through it, I couldn’t stand to even have it, so I threw it away. (13 was a hard year; throwing the diary out turned out to be oddly therapeutic, like burning an old boyfriend’s photo.)
Teresa, I used to be so very embarrassed by my old diaries. I’d read them in utter disbelief over how different I was than how I remembered myself. But they have taught me to laugh at myself and be kind to the person I used to be because that person became who I currently am. I can understand tossing out a diary from a really hard year and how that can be therapeutic. When you look at your 17-year-old diary though, be kind to her
Emerson might have evoked fairies, but you’re the one who wrote using a My Twin Stars diary, so don’t throw stones. And maybe when Harvard someday publishes your collected diaries, they’ll use the unicorn illustration for the series cover. Probably not in velveteen though.
Stefanie, Emerson is a famous American writer who is not a household name in the UK. My Penguin Encyclopedia calls him “a bold advocate of spiritual individualism”- where does he seem to stand in modern US culture? Diaries- don’t go there!
Ian, I’m not sure Emerson is a household name in the US, but his influence is still culturally very present. Most people will know him as the friend of Thoreau, a smaller number will know him as an essayist and transcendentalist. Most Americans toss around paraphrases of his aphorisms without even knowing it is Emerson they are quoting. In literature, philosophy and academe, Emerson looms quite large. There has been an uptick of popular interest in him the last few years as part of the “American Bloomsbury” group.
Cindy my sister, hey, I was 10! I’m sure if Emerson had a diary when he was ten it would have had something appropriately silly on it too! Oh yes, Harvard will definitely have to reproduce the unicorn illustration for at least partial effect. The velveteen really takes it to the totally amazing level though
It may be wrong, but I think the unicorn and the velveteen are rather nice.
And I certainly had nothing to say at 10, so hats off to you for keeping a diary at all! I did have a bit of a giggle at Emerson invoking fairies, but there are more than enough times when I would settle for help from ANY quarter, so I am bearing those fairies in mind. Given Emerson’s life trajectory, they obviously didn’t do him any harm!
Litlove, oh they are rather nice, especially the texture
I didn’t have much to say at 10 either since most of the diary is empty. The fairies were definitely good to Emerson. Perhaps instead of giggling about it I should invoke them in my current diary. Maybe it’s not too late! And maybe they will provide you assistance too 
I didn’t keep I diary…at least I don’t think so…although I vaguely remember a squat, chubby lock-and-key book…but it might have been my sister’s. However, starting when I was about 8 or 9, on New Years Eve I would take one of the large index cards my dad had in his office and would memorialize the names of: my best friend, my favorite actor, best books read, best movies of the year, what was going on in politics that year (yes…*politics*…I can hardly believe I was interested in politics), music, etc. A synopsis of the year, in effect. And then I would write, “Good-bye 1958″ or ’59, ’60. I probably did that until some time in high school. Happily, I kept my inner-most thoughts to myself, which should save me from rolling over in my grave. I suspect my diary would have been appallingly twee.
Grad, I have one of those lock and key diaries too. I lost the key pretty quickly but learned how to pick the lock with a hair pin
I like your New Year’s Eve index card tradition. It might not have been a personal review, but it still reveals what you thought was important for the year. Very fun to look back on those!
I love reading diaries, but I have never been able to keep a diary. I recently was going through my desk and found a mostly blank journal that ha a few pages written in at the very beginning. I started to read what was there and it was so painful to even think about I ripped it out and shredded and then shoved it to the bottom of the garbage. Good thing other diarists don’t do this–then again most diarists have better things to go back and read about than people like myself!
Kewl unicorn!
Danielle, Thanks! I also have a diary with teddy bears on it and one with Donny and Marie. I was so awesome!
I had been keeping a regular diary for years before I had even thought to go back and read any of my early ones. when I finally did, oh what a humiliating experience that was. I couldn’t read all of them it was so bad. But I couldn’t throw them out either. There are a good many of my diaries I haven’t even read since I wrote them. When I do read an old one though I am always embarrassed but also fascinated by how different the events I wrote about are on the page to what I have in my memory.
Oh, I LOVE old journals!! Mine are hilarious. I should post some of the excellent entries from 5th grade, oy.
Daphne, oh I want to see your unicorn journal! Once I got over the embarrassment, those old diaries are hilarious.
(I have a unicorn journal too!!)
That unicorn cover is just so classic teen, isn’t it? Diaries are horribly incriminating things, aren’t they? I’ve never kept one on a regular basis, but I have plenty of old diaries up in the attic. I’ve been meaning, for ages, to write a blog post about the way diaries force us to stop believing the lies we believe about ourselves (one of which I discovered from an old diary was that I never suffered from insomnia when I was in my twenties. I have a diary, whose every other entry seems to begin, “I can’t sleep, so decided I’d write in here.”). So much for my carefree twenties when I slept blissfully every night!
I wonder what we’ll all think of our blogs 20 years from now. Maybe it will be different, since we knew from the get-go that we were writing for some sort of an audience. Still, I have revisited some old blog posts that I’ve been tempted to delete (never have, but I’ve been tempted).
Emily, Oh yes, classic teen. I also had quite the unicorn knick-knack collection. You are exactly right how diaries stop us from believing the lies we believe about ourselves. That’s funny about catching yourself out on the insomnia. I always thought of myself as a quiet sort of loner person but I look back on my diaries and they are filled with names of friends and going here and there, a lot more social and a lot more running around than I remember!
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I couldn’t stop smiling when I read your blog and all the comments. Thank you for posting this.
I would laugh but… I have diaries too.
My first one has a nice big rainbow on it, and a lock! 
I wish I had written more when I was little because I have forgotten so much from back then. But what might seem significant now probably didn’t seem significant then. It is an odd feeling to know that one has written something from an entirely different perspective than one has now.
And now imagine you had kept a video diary…
http://boingboing.net/2012/07/05/a-conversation-with-my-12-ye.html