Time to be earnest: Thoughts on retrospection, gossip, hymnody and the transitoriness of life, by P D James

A diary, by definition, is a daily record. I very much doubt whether this proposed record of one year in my life will be a diary within the proper meaning of that word; certainly I can’t see myself recording the events of every day. I feel, too, that many social events can’t properly be mentioned since I have no intention of betraying confidences and some of the most interesting things I learn are said to me in confidence. I love gossip in other people’s diaries, while recognizing that its interest is in inverse proportion to its truth, but I suspect that this record will have little to offer in the way of titillating revelations. And to look back on one’s life is to experience the capriciousness of memory.

When I was very young and leaving church with my mother, she told me that the hymn we had sung, “Blessed Are the Pure in Heart,” was sung at the funeral of a friend of hers who had died in childbirth with her baby during the great flu pandemic which followed the First World War. Now I can never hear it without thinking of that young mother and her child, both dead before I was born. No effort of will can banish a vague unfocused sadness from my thoughts every time that hymn is sung. And the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

So tomorrow, on 3rd August, I shall write the first entry in a record which I propose to keep for one year, from my seventy-seventh to my seventy-eighth birthday. Will I persist with this effort? Only time will tell. And will I be here at the end of the year? At seventy-seven that is not an irrational question. But then is it irrational at any age? In youth we go forward caparisoned in immortality; it is only, I think, in age that we fully realize the transitoriness of life.

From Time To Be Earnest by P D James. May my Take Note blogs accomplish some of what Phyllis James attempted and in which she very much succeeded. It is such a privilege to be able to reflect on life–past, present and future. Thanks to Dean Robert of Canterbury who celebrated her life on Saturday, November 27 on the anniversary of her death in 2014.