I have no recollection of what possessed me to start a daily diary, but I remember my first volume was a small, novelty notebook which I won at a friend’s birthday party in 1982. I was six years old. Since then, I have attempted to write an entry every single day. Initially, my childish musings extended to little more than a dull list of which family members (and pets) accompanied us on day trips, but from 1992 onwards, my diary became much more.

Since then, I have a strict routine at the start of each year. I buy a large, hard-back page-per-day narrow lined diary and generally create a collage for the front cover—usually pictures torn from magazines, postcards or vintage wrapping paper. My diaries have evolved to become scrapbooks too—I add tickets to music shows, the theatre, festival wrist bands, passport photos, press passes . . . anything which otherwise would have no other home, but which serves as a record of my day.

I have few rules when it comes to writing the diary. As a teenager, I resolved never to write it in a bad mood, as I didn’t want to be reminded of negative things, but that changed with the death of a friend in 1994. Having a diary made dealing with his death so much easier—though I have never been able to read those entries. I think the act of writing cleanses me of the day’s stresses; a problem always seems smaller once it’s written down.

And yes, I do still write by hand! Typing wouldn’t feel as though it was me writing—and I like the continuity, seeing my handwriting change over the years. My diary has also served as a collective memory for my friends, as I can tell them exactly what we were doing on any given day. For my school days, this is particularly useful. As our memories fade, it’s hilarious to have a first-hand account of the boredom and monotony of my teenage years, and a reminder of the hopes and aspirations I had then.

I’ve been very fortunate to meet some powerful people as part of my job, so being able to record those meetings—from a historical point of view—is interesting. I have the press pass from the day I met former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a detailed account of encounters with Quentin Tarantino and Dennis Hopper. I know I wouldn’t want anyone to read my diary in my lifetime, but I feel compelled to continue it so I have a full record of (almost) my whole life, to look back on when I am old! I hate the thought of a day passing unrecorded.

Claire Hamilton is a Liverpool-based BBC radio journalist who spent a year on a career break in New York, during which time she conducted volunteer research for the Morgan’s exhibition The Diary.

You may not be able to judge a published book by its cover, but can you judge a diarist by his notebook? Sandrine Lacorie looks at the journal of battlefield physician Dominique Jean Larrey (1766–1842)

Tennessee Williams confided his torments to a “little blue book” with a cover of white polka dots on a blue background, and the appearance of today’s blogs can be customized to suit the taste of the blogger. So what can the casing (or physical container) of a diary reveal about its owner beyond the experiences related in the text of the diary itself? A look at the diary of Dominique Jean Larrey, celebrated surgeon of the nineteenth century, may give us a clue.

As Larrey made his first journal entry on March 17, 1812, he had just been ordered to join Napoleon’s Grand Army as Surgeon-in-Chief on an out-and-return journey from Paris to Moscow. In a small, green paper notebook kept preciously wrapped in a majestic red leather portfolio, he recorded his experience in one of the greatest military disasters in history—the Russian campaign of 1812–13, which would trigger Napoleon’s downfall.

Larrey’s original manuscript diary reveals him to be a strong, sensible, and impartial man. His crimson leather portfolio (shown at right) was common at the beginning of the nineteenth century—one can see a similar covering for German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s diary (below left) in the Morgan’s exhibition The Diary —but Larrey’s case is unique. Worn and beaten, its leather skin is heavily wrinkled, and its flap is damaged, symbolic of the events its content describes. Larrey repaired the broken thong used to hold the flap at least once by sewing a beige doeskin strap to ensure that the diary would remain safely wrapped inside the portfolio. This testifies to the tremendous importance Larrey placed on his diary and on the preservation of his experience, despite his modest means.

“Surgeon-in-Chief of the Grand Army” may sound like a glorious title to us today, but it was not necessarily an enviable position at the time, especially financially. In fact, the Russian campaign, as Larrey knew, would likely leave him in debt. So even though he had a prominent position, he did not necessarily have the money to buy a new casing or repair it with luxury materials. Despite the financial burden he endured, Larrey filled his diary with testimonials to his men and accounts of his experiences. His only resentment was reserved for the generals and administrators in Napoleon’s army who made themselves rich at the expense of their comrades-in-arms. These passages would later be cautiously removed from Larrey’s published memoir. This original manuscript copy of his diary never alludes to his reluctant presence in the army; nor does he express any grievance about his commission—but his 1817 published memoir discloses that his “fear that a far-off land expedition was in the works” had been realized.

Like the fragility and sturdiness of his little green notebook and its red portfolio, Larrey’s narration of the events, places, battles, and medical procedures is sensitive and sensible. Grave and gruesome at times, his diary is always gripping but never depressing. His pages are filled with realistic and compassionate accounts of people he encounters: civilians, colleagues, or wounded soldiers from both sides of the battlefield. In fact, he earned a reputation for his selflessness and solidarity, operating on anyone, anywhere, and under any circumstances.

There are many examples of his consistent respect and empathy for the extraordinary circumstances his fellow men were faced with. On the retreat from Moscow (out of 600,000, fewer than 40,000 returned), he writes: “A greater disaster than this has never been seen. . . . Cold and hunger were the leading cause of death. . . . Hunger did not know its brother . . . nature no longer knew its rights.”

Like his modest notebook, Larrey also reveals humility and vulnerability, conceding graciously that he owes his life to the men of the Grand Army, especially during his crossing of the Berezina: “I had twice re-crossed these ill-fated bridges to save part of my equipment, which I had been vainly searching for, and to send across some cases of surgical instruments of which we had the greatest need. These journeys nearly cost me my life. If my name and person had not been known in the army, I should never have cleared these obstacles, but I was passed from soldier to soldier and successively I rejoined the headquarters.”

Reading page after page, we develop a deep kinship for Dominique Jean Larrey, who emerges as an honest and endearing man, a romantic hero like those of the nineteenth century. Reading Larrey’s diary, it is easy to see why even Napoleon would, in his will, call him “the finest man I’ve known.”

Like his diary and its casing, Larrey is at times sensitive and physically fragile, but never psychologically weak. Published book designs often sacrifice the integrity of the authors’ creation to appeal to modern sensibilities of readers and buyers, but diarists are free to choose the protective casings for their precious memories. Larrey’s journal exterior is not merely an illustration of his inmost sensibilities—it provides an insight into his character and circumstance at the moment of creation, and a visual and palpable clue of particular moments of this great man’s journey through life.

Sandrine Lacorie is an art historian and research assistant for the Morgan’s Literary and Historical Manuscripts department.

Images: portrait of Larrey by Anne-Louis Girodet-Trison, 1804 (Musée du Louvre); journals of Larrey and Schopenhauer (The Morgan Library & Museum)

When we're faced with the unfathomable, can keeping a journal or documenting memories help us along?

Ten years after that September day that began with glorious sunshine and ended with black skies and unfathomable loss, we remember. But how can we manage memories so large, so heavy-laden? This Friday an extraordinary group will gather at The Morgan Library & Museum to talk about memory, pain, community, and the 9/11 anniversary. Please join us as we consider how keeping journals—documenting our memories and, if we choose to, sharing them—can provide both a private outlet and a lasting tribute to those we lost.

We’ll hear from Bill Keegan, who commanded a Port Authority Police Special Operations rescue and recovery team at the World Trade Center after 9/11. Month after grueling month he and his team worked in the pit, face to face with death and destruction, committed to recovering the remains of the fallen. His post-9/11 journal is on view in the Morgan exhibition The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives, alongside the manuscript notes that Walt Whitman kept over a century before as he visited dying soldiers during the American Civil War, lamenting the loss of so much beautiful life. Like Whitman, Keegan published an account of the personal experience he documented in his journal, but he’s gone a step (a BIG step) beyond sharing memory. Keegan founded H.E.A.R.T. 9/11, a group of highly skilled volunteers (veterans of the NYPD, FDNY, and PAPD; EMTs, nurses, doctors and trade union members). Many once worked together at ground zero, gaining invaluable experience responding to cataclysmic events; now they travel around the country and the world to help rebuild communities after disasters such as the recent earthquake in Haiti. (You can hear Bill talk about the organization’s work here).

And we’ll hear from Mary Fetchet, a clinical social worker who lost her 24-year-old son Brad on 9/11. Like Bill Keegan, she drew on her own experience—a mother’s pain and loss—and became a powerhouse of positive community-building activity. She is the founding director of Voices of September 11th, an organization that provides information and a wide range of support services for 9/11 families, rescue workers and survivors. Recognizing the power of personal memory, VOICES launched the 9/11 Living Memorial Project, a digital archive that commemorates lives lost and documents the stories of survivors. The over 60,000 photographs, letters, eulogies, and other mementos collected by VOICES will become a core component of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. (You can see Mary here on MSNBC discussing with Martin Bashir the emotions stirred up after the killing of Osama Bin Laden.)

Of course it was a young girl—Anne Frank—who, more than any other diary-keeper, impressed on all of us the emotional value of writing down the private side of hardship, and who (unwittingly) turning an agonizing personal story into a source of positive inspiration. On May 13 we also welcome Maureen McNeil, Director of Education at the Anne Frank Center USA, who has used Anne Frank’s diary as a catalyst to encourage children, prisoners, and countless others to write for personal healing and empowerment.

Finally, we’ll have a chance to visit the exhibition The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives and see firsthand how people have, for centuries, turned to private journals in order to document their days, sort out creative problems, help them through crises, comfort them in solitude or pain, or preserve their stories for the future. With journals kept by Napoleon’s battlefield surgeon, a woman interned by the Nazis during World War II, and many others, the exhibition illustrates how such journals bridge time and experience in their expression of love, death, loss, and joy.

We hope you'll join us for this special evening! To reserve a FREE space for the May 13 event at the Morgan focusing on 9/11 and journal-keeping, call 212.685.0008, ext. 560, or email tickets@themorgan.org. The event is co-organized by Voices of September 11th, H.E.A.R.T. 9/11, The AnneFrankCenterUSA, and The Morgan Library & Museum.

Photograph of Anne Frank: @AFS/AFF, Amsterdam/Basel.

Before the electronic mobile device, before the blank book, after the wax tablet, how did people take notes? A look at a rare example of a Renaissance erasable pad and its contemporary counterparts.

Many of us keep diaries in an attempt to capture time—to leave a physical trace of our being even after we’re gone. But some personal writings are ephemeral, disappearing from view almost as soon as we’ve committed our thoughts to paper or screen. When we send our Facebook posts or Tweets out into the world, we create a kind of moment-by-moment diary, letting friends know what’s on our minds. But the focus is much less on the preservation of memory than on the instant communication of impressions. And while technology does offer powerful tools to capture and store such digital diaries for the future, chances are most of us are not requesting a yearly spreadsheet of our Tweets for our personal archive. We Tweet in the moment, and then the moment is gone, and it’s on to the next.

As I thought about such disappearing diaries, I looked at a worn but extraordinary object in the Morgan’s collection that might be considered a precursor to both the pocket diary and the handheld electronic device. Robert Triplet’s Writing Tables with a Kalendar for xxiii Yeeres, published in London in 1609, is about the same size as an iPhone. It includes a printed calendar that covers several years. But most intriguingly, it also includes a few strange, stiff blank sheets toward the middle. These are erasable pages, once specially treated with a coating of gesso and glue. Much like a smartphone owner, the user of this little book could tuck it into a pocket for easy reference, and even make notes on the go with a simple stylus (no clunky pen and ink required!). Later, when the notes were no longer needed, they could be wiped away. The book even includes instructions for erasing and rewriting: “Take a litle peece of Spunge, or a Linnencloath, being cleane without any soyle: wet it in water” and “wipe that you have written very lightly, and it will out, and within one quarter of a hower you may write in the same place againe.”

What a fascinating little object! Such calendars with erasable pages were common during the Renaissance, but very few survive because they were worn to bits and discarded when no longer useful. Even (the fictional) Hamlet used one: after seeing the ghost of his father, he declares, “Yea, from the Table of my Memory, / I’ll wipe away all triuiall fond Records. . . .” (If you want to know more about writing tables and erasable paper, look for the excellent scholarly work of Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe.)

If Hamlet was able to wipe away memory by cleaning off his erasable sheets of paper, an even more dramatic example of the fleeting diary is that of the Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong. In the 1990s, Song Dong began to make daily diary entries, painting them with water on stone. Each calligraphic entry quickly evaporates, leaving no trace. Rather than creating an indelible record, Song Dong leaves nothing behind. This process frees him from considering who might read his words one day, because the answer is clear: no one. Thus he’s spared the dilemma that John Steinbeck articulated so well: “I have tried to keep diaries before but they didn’t work out because of the necessity to be honest.” Song Dong dramatizes what is true for many diarists—that it is the release of thought and emotion—the very act of putting pen (or brush) to paper (or stone) that matters.

Christine Nelson is the Morgan’s Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. The Renaissance erasable tablet she describes in this post is on view until May 22 in the exhibition The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives.

Images 1–2: Writing Tables with a Kalendar for xxiii Yeeres, by Robert Triplet. London: Companie of Stationers, 1609. The Morgan Library & Museum; purchased by Pierpont Morgan before 1913. Image 3: Song Dong’s water diary.

Author-illustrator Jeff Kinney answers our questions about his hugely popular series

One of today’s best-selling series for kids is Jeff Kinney’s fictionalized diary of a seventh-grader named Greg Heffley, a “wimpy kid” who tells his story daily in words and pictures. Authors from Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights) to Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) have framed their novels in the form of diaries to allow their characters to show themselves self-consciously and to structure their plots episodically. In Kinney’s hands, the fictionalized diary becomes a hilarious outlet for tales of the excruciating (but all-important) minutiae in the everyday life of an adolescent. His young protagonist is both self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, honest and self-justifying. Like every diarist, he has a unique voice. Kinney told us about his work on the series.

Why did you decide to frame your story in the form of a diary? How does the diary form affect how your stories unfold?

I decided to write in diary form because I thought that kind of presentation would allow Greg Heffley to come across as an authentic kid. And when a kid writes in a journal or diary, they write in unstructured daily entries. I thought that felt right for the character.

How far ahead do you plan Greg’s days? Do you know what’s going to happen to him very far in advance?

I spend a few months writing down ideas for jokes, and then I collect them all and string the best ones together in a loose narrative. I do try to have some structure in my books, but I also try not to overdo it.

Have you heard from many kids who decided to keep a diary-either in words or pictures-after reading your books?

I don’t think journal-keeping is natural for boys, so I haven’t heard of many boys keeping journals because they were inspired by my books. But I’ve seen many take a stab at it with a three-or-four-day entry.

For a kid who initially thought diary-keeping was for girls, your wimpy kid sure does take to the practice! Once he got started writing, has your character had any further reservations about diary keeping?

Greg thinks he’s doing a service to the world by keeping a diary. He’s going to be famous one day, so of course people will appreciate the fact that he’s put so much on record.

Is diary keeping for wimps?

No, it’s for people who are smart and introspective. Unless you’re Greg Heffley.

Even in today’s electronic age, kids delight in making something beautiful and useful with their own hands.

On a recent Saturday afternoon at the Morgan, kids and their families gathered to learn about historic diaries and to build their own blank notebooks, using gorgeous materials and sophisticated techniques. Each went home with something beautiful and useful, made with their own hands! And they took away fresh thoughts about diary keeping.

Morgan educator Bel Mojica began the afternoon with a visit to the exhibition The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives. As she launched into dramatic renderings of the personal stories of a seventeenth-century pirate and a nineteenth-century schoolteacher (Charlotte Brontë!), Bel invited the kids to think about diaries: why do people write them? Should they be kept private? They looked at lots of examples, from lavishly gold-tooled leather volumes to the humble handmade pamphlets of Elizabeth Morgan, who lived in small-town Western Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century, sometimes using old newspaper and straight pins to bind her journals.

Kids then delved into journal-making with book artist Stephanie Kraus, who describes the hands-on portion of the afternoon: “We started the class by creating simple pamphlet-stitch journals with speckled bond paper and patterned fabric paper covers. Then we launched into the more complicated double-signature pamphlet stitch journal with a tied wraparound cover, using creamy Arches paper for the two signatures and once again using richly patterned fabric paper for the cover.

“Students loved the papers—some were almost brocaded, others art deco—a broad range of options, all exciting. Students stitched the two signatures with variegated thread, and secured the wraparound with a colored rhinestone brad. Students got creative with how they used the excess thread (deliberately left while tying off the signatures) to secure the wraparound closed; some used one long thread, some twined all the excess threads together, some used one long thread and twined the other threads around that thread.

“The fabric paper covers, matching threads and rhinestone brads pulled together to create some truly beautiful journals! Students seemed thrilled with their books. I’m sure they’ll have fun filling them in at home. And they probably will remember how to do pamphlet stitch for a while, since they did it three times during class!”

To learn about upcoming events at the Morgan, including family programs, take a look at the Calendar of Events.

Left: Zachary (age 8) and his mom work on journal making. Right: Jeremy (age 9) displays his finished product.

I believe that we have to practice freedom to be free. Diary writing is one way to practice freedom—there is no mandatory form, topic, or style, only that one must do it regularly. When Anne Frank sat down to write in her diary, labels and prejudices dropped away: she was no longer a persecuted Jewish girl, but a human being making choices, critiquing the world around her, taking responsibility for herself, setting her own moral compass. This was the goal of The Anne Frank Center USA’s (AFC) Prison Diary Writing Project, in collaboration with PEN American Center, which started three years ago.

Today, prisoners from more than 30 U.S. states read Anne Frank’s diary, write their own journal, and send it to The Anne Frank Center to archive for educational purposes. Being incarcerated is lonely, scary, regimented, boring, and often dull or violent, but prisoners also write that freedom on the “outside” seems scary. Anne Frank gives them to hope that they too can do something good with their lives, even while doing time.

About half of the prisoners state in their diaries that making wrong choices and not accepting responsibility for their actions is the reason they landed in prison. The other half of the prisoners write that they’ve never been loved, don’t think they’ve ever loved anyone, never had a home and have been incarcerated since they were teenagers.

Excerpts from the diaries are read aloud on radio programs, at fundraisers, at the PEN World Voices Festival, and published in articles, books and online. Last spring, The Anne Frank Center created a diary exhibit which included forty-eight prison diaries, 5 incarcerated youth diaries and the diaries of author Mary Morris, Dada poet Valery Oisteanu, diarist Zlata Filipovic, Holocaust survivor Clara Kramer, Freedom Writer Laura Guzman, young filmmakers, artists and high school students. It was a celebration of a shared human experience and underscored the fact that if we want to solve the problems of the world, we need to hear everyone’s story.

Anne Frank is considered by many to be the conscience of twentieth century thought. This is because as a girl she wrote a diary of such beauty and truth that it is a literary work of art; and because she was brutally killed by an educated, elected, charismatic and evil leader of the western world simply because she was Jewish. Unfortunately, prisons don’t contain evil—it is part of us. Perhaps this century, by practicing freedom and accepting responsibility, we as a global world will learn to make better choices.

Maureen McNeil is the Director of Education at the Anne Frank Center USA, a not-for-profit organization that promotes the universal message of tolerance. In addition to her work with the Prison Diary Writing Project, McNeil has introduced countless students to the power of diary keeping through the example of Anne Frank.

Photograph of Anne Frank: @AFS/AFF, Amsterdam/Basel.

As our lives become filled with an endless stream of content and commentary, what is the value of the glaringly blank page?

Handwritten diaries are full of words on paper, but they’re often full of intriguing blank spaces as well. A page unfilled can mean many things—a day so rich there was no time to write; a day so empty it seemed there was nothing worth saying. Perhaps the forward march of life simply outpaced the writer’s commitment to self-documentation. Virginia Woolf expressed this dilemma best: “Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.”

With all the powerful new ways people can document their lives on screen—in blogs, on Facebook, in Twitter feeds, in private diaries kept electronically rather than in physical notebooks—we no longer confront the blank page. Sure, a blank screen glows before us as we collect our thoughts, but once we start writing, no physical trace is left of the emptiness that came before.

As I looked through the many handwritten notebooks that made their way in The Diary exhibition, I was struck by one instance of blankness in particular: the space John Ruskin left to mark the period during which he was incapacitated by mental illness. After he recovered, he deliberately left two pages unwritten in his diary before continuing to document his life. All he wrote, on a double-page spread left otherwise dramatically empty, were the words “February to April—the dream.” (Read and hear more about Ruskin’s diary here.)

I am reminded of the extraordinary culminating scene in The King’s Speech, in which Colin Firth (as King George VI) struggles to present the address of his life, his halting delivery speaking volumes about his emotional life while underscoring the gravity of the words on either side of the pauses. In between decline and health, Ruskin, too, left an eloquent pause, a physical marker of his emotional passage—an empty space for reflection and remembrance. So today I salute both John Ruskin and Colin Firth (an unlikely pair, perhaps!), for reminding us of the power of the void. The empty page in the diary is equivalent to the moment of silence, which can sometimes resonate just as loudly as the best-chosen words.

Christine Nelson is the curator of The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives.

Image credit: Diary of John Ruskin (1819–1900), 1876–84. The Morgan Library & Museum; bequest of Helen Gill Viljoen, 1974

Mention Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and most of us summon up the image of a platinum-haired Marilyn Monroe sheathed in cotton-candy pink and gushing about her best friend: the diamond. But decades before Marilyn slithered into the role, Lorelei Lei started out as the provocative creation of writer Anita Loos. Her jazz-age novel (the manuscript of which is in the Morgan's collection) caused a sensation when it was published in 1925, and its sometimes-forgotten subtitle—The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady—reads like the heading of a tell-all social blog. Indeed, I'd like to put forth Lorelei Lee as the mother of all bloggers, the patron saint of everyone who has realized that all it takes is something to say (and it needn't be much) and a blank page (or screen) to turn us into published authors.

Like Pride and Prejudice, Blondes has a memorable beginning: “A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs. I mean I seem to be thinking practically all of the time.” What a stunning opening! In just a few hilarious words Loos not only introduces one of literature's most memorable narrators; she also defines the diary (and its public counterpart, the blog): a place, infinitely expandable, in which to record the never-ending flow of one's thoughts over time.

When her friend sends a bound volume over as a gift, Lorelei tells her maid, “Well, Lulu, here is another book, and we have not read half the ones we have got yet.” But she soon realizes that she needn't be concerned: “when I opened it and saw that it was all a blank I remembered what my gentleman acquaintance said, and so then I realized that it was a diary. So here I am writing a book instead of reading one.” Never mind all those unread books on the shelf—Lorelei can turn her own life into a book!

“It would be strange if I turn out to be an authoress,” Lorelei admits. After all, she tried to be a musician but ended up throwing her mandolin against the wall in frustration. “But writing is different,” she declares, “because you do not have to learn or practice.” With tongue firmly in cheek, Loos (through Lorelei) hits on a key rule of blogging: anyone can do it! While traditional publishing venues admit only a select few, the blogosphere has no filtering process—no pesky editors with their soul-crushing rejection letters. Even if your mind is as (apparently) empty as Lorelei's, you can go for it! The world may be listening!

The lure of the private diary is that it gives us a safe space to express whatever is on our minds, however inane it may seem, however embarrassing or ill-formed. There are no prerequisites (except the ability to read and write). A blog gives us a chance to do the same—for an audience. And Lorelei Lei is always eager for an audience, a new admirer who might lead her to a new piece of jewelry. In fact, before long Lorelei's diary has turned into performance, much like a blog: “I am taking special pains with my diary from now on,” she explains, “because I am really writing it for Gus. I mean he and I are going to read it some evening in front of the fireplace.” With this transformation, some of Lorelei's thoughts become, ironically, too private to be confided to her diary! It becomes, instead, a place to put forth a carefully crafted identity, complete with name-dropping, embellishment, and self-vaunting. Sound familiar?

But let's not be too hard on Lorelei. She gave voice to a tell-all generation, and no less than the great Edith Wharton declared (in a postcard in the Morgan's collection, pictured below) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to be “the great American novel—at last!” The drive to fill rows of “encylopediacs” with the stories of our lives will endure, or, as Lorelei put it, “when a girl has a lot of fate in her life it is sure to keep on happening.” And the diary, too, will keep on happening, whether on paper or online.

Christine Nelson is the Morgan's Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts and curator of the exhibition The Diary.

Photo 1: Illustration from the first edition of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,by Anita Loos (1894–1981); The Morgan Library & Museum; purchased as the gift of Christopher Wold Johnson. Photo 2: Postcard from Edith Wharton to Frank Crowninshield, 12 January 1926; The Morgan Library & Museum; purchased on the Fellows Fund as the gift of Frederick R. Koch, 1981.

One gloomy summer day in 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne made this note in his diary: “A rainy day—a rainy day—and I do verily believe there is no sunshine in this world, except what beams from my wife’s eyes.” As lovers embrace on this Valentine’s Day almost two centuries later, I have to wonder: could such a sappy line have been sincere? How many of us will see sunshine in our lovers’ eyes tonight—and dare to make such a declaration?

I don’t doubt that Nathaniel was deeply in love (it was a month after his marriage to Sophia Peabody), but could his words have been colored by the fact that his wife was practically looking over his shoulder as he wrote? She had banished him to his study, he said, to make this entry in the diary they had agreed to keep together. He knew she would read his words later. This wasn’t the only time Nathaniel teased Sophia about her sunny disposition. The following year, as buds emerged and birds chirped and Sophia seemed in perfect sync with nature’s reawakening, Nathaniel exclaimed, “I have married the Spring—I am husband to the month of May!”

These lovers kept a diary for each other, an ongoing valentine that culminated in the pages I chose to display in The Diary: Sophia’s astonishing first-anniversary entry in which she told her husband that such milestones (including, presumably, Valentine’s Day) mean nothing to those who live in a state of perpetual bliss: “We have been in the free ranges of Eternity ever since we first recognized each other, & Time is beneath our feet.” Since we first recognized each other—what an extraordinary way to express that feeling of mutual accord that binds lovers and best friends!

Other lovers present in the exhibition did not feel so blessed. Fanny Grenfell, separated from her boyfriend by a disapproving family, kept a diary in the form of unsent love letters, pouring out page after page of extravagant pining. Adèle Hugo (Victor’s daughter) feigned pregnancy, faked a marriage announcement, and followed the unwilling Albert Pinson around the world while writing sheaves of diary entries. Aging writer Paul Horgan watched with disdain as self-absorbed hippies embraced on the streets of Aspen, but confided a secret regret to his diary: “in old age, love’s most pure self is the most clearly seen when it is most generally beyond reach.” And Tennessee Williams, despite proclaiming himself a “child of love” after having sex (twice) and listening to church bells clang in Barcelona, longed for deep and lasting companionship.

The youngest lover represented in the exhibition is our own Pierpont Morgan, who marked the day at age twelve when he presumably held a girl in his arms for the first time—albeit in the well-supervised context of a dance lesson. “Had first rate time,” he wrote. A first rate time! Who could ask for more? Victorian teenager Charles Barrett took a break from writing about Plutarch homework and “scratch fights” with his mother to profess love for a beautiful girl named Clara. “I would give anything to walk with her alone,” he wrote, and he even confessed to peering at her through a telescope. Lest his friends and family get hold of his diary, he used Freemasons’ cipher to encrypt a poetic homage (shown in the photo) to the “sylph-like” Clara. And, like the young Barrett, nineteenth-century Brooklyn factory worker Thorvald Thollefsen used a sort of code—mirror writing—to kept track of amorous encounters on the sofa with Anna S., the woman who would later become his wife.

With all this love and longing reverberating throughout the gallery, the diary that touches me most this Valentine’s Day is that of dear Charles Seliger, the gifted artist who died a year and a half ago, having entrusted his many, many volumes of diaries to the Morgan. I spent hours in our collection vault reading Charles’s thoughtful record of his varied and voracious reading and his insights about art and literature, but found myself in tears when I opened a volume he began in December 1975. Charles’s loyalty to his diary was such that even if he began writing in a volume that didn’t feel right, he stuck with it until it was full, and only then allowed himself to choose another notebook. But he made an exception that day in 1975. He felt his life was about to begin again, so he abandoned one notebook and began a fresh one. He made his first entry in it on the day he married Lenore Klebanow. “We are ourselves,” he wrote, “she is natural, no makeup, no hairdo, just herself, a reason enough to love her.” Like the Hawthornes, the newly-married Seligers celebrated the simple fact of having “recognized each other,” secure in the knowledge that being “just themselves” was enough.

Charles Seliger closed his wedding-day diary entry with this passage: “There is little else to write, for now what was and will be cannot be written. We left two houses this a.m. as two people, we met with our friends and before their eyes we became one—and it is that one, that very late this beautiful, holy night, drifted off the sleep, as the two innocents, now one, now two, to face the future and forever after.”

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Christine Nelson is the Morgan’s Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. All the diaries she mentions in this post are on view until May 22 in the exhibition The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives.

Image 1: Detail from an illuminated border. Book of Hours, Netherlands, Utrecht, ca. 1500. MS G.5, fols. 18v–19. William S. Glazier Collection, given 1984. Image 2: Manuscript diary of Charles Barrett, 1866–67. Purchased on the Acquisitions Fund, 1985.