Everything But Nothing: A Diary

Nizzy comes home and turns out to be his mother. She tells him to stop fussing. The poor man is having his period. After just one hour of reading them, I was desperate to look at them again. I decided I wanted to find out who the diarist had been and why she had died and been thrown away. I knew I should take all three boxes to Cambridge police station and, if they remained unclaimed, after a suitable time have them incinerated.

I was a Peeping Tom to do anything else. The writer describes things in a way that makes it clear she never expected or wanted anyone else to hear about them, let alone put them in a biography. Thrilled, I lit a fire, backed myself on to an armchair and kept reading.

THE DIARY OF SAINT SISTER FAUSTINA - Cracow Lagiewniki, Vilnius, Lithuania

I could hardly believe my luck. But whenever I fantasised that she was somebody famous, I felt immediately, and as decisively as if the books had been dropped on my head, bored. The great excitement of an anonymous diary is that it might belong to anybody.

Imagine that she turned out to be some celebrity and the books and my voyeurism became almost nauseating. It says a great deal for the diarist that she managed to keep me reading. She remained, throughout the guided tour she gave me of her mind, honest, funny, outlandish and respectable. It was difficult to tell which was murdering Dido quicker: I was now working on the diaries every spare minute of my time.

He was her private piano teacher: He is also spiteful, petty-minded and a prig. In the midst of his relentless attacks, he also gave away her name. I missed my nameless pronoun. An abstract that had a few minutes before floated everywhere had been crushed into a particular. I liked this woman, whatever her name.

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I enjoyed her clumsiness and her obsessions and her occasional desires for an outburst of violence. I thought I recognised a lot of her qualities in myself. I wanted to understand her. Biographers often report that they enjoy a private relationship with their subject that is even when this is impossible, because the subject is dead shared on both sides. So what if Laura was called Laura?

At one point in the early s, in her 20s, she was living in poverty in London. Like every young, healthy, intelligent, imaginative, gifted person, she was full of wild and impossible plans. The handwriting in these volumes is urgent.

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Some entries are thousands of words long. She is trying to capture every second of her day. Occasionally, pressed on by her excitement, her handwriting wobbles and she resorts to underscoring: Elsa is 50 years older than Laura. I had to leap up from my bed and dab the walls to sop up my splattered tea after I read it. When they first met and Laura fell in love, Laura was 14 and Elsa She lost her closest friend, her mentor, her decision-maker, her personification of artistry and, for the next 20 years, herself.

She gives up her hobbies: The early diaries from the s are written in ebullient letters. Five words are sometimes all it takes to fill the width of a page. The height of her letters becomes the same as the thickness of her pen nib. It is impossible to read more than a volume at a time of this miniscule script.

After , everything succumbs to television. She disappears as a human being in these last years of her life, and reappears as cataloguer of Michael Barrymore gossip. Laura frequently refers to a man called Peter. She can leave her room and the house; but she is back on her mattress by the end of the day.

Is she suffering from a mild version of Stockholm syndrome?

Laura is not his prisoner. She is not the Trinity don gone wrong. She is his live-in housekeeper.

And so the surprises leaped up from the pages of these gentle, quiet diaries. Everything in, about and around the text was a clue.

Diary of a somebody: could I solve the mystery of 148 lost notebooks?

I wondered if careful scientific analysis could reveal whether the injuries the wonky Ribena box had sustained as it landed in the skip were because it had been hurled perpetrator enraged or lobbed gently perpetrator calculating. I enjoyed my intimacy with this universal woman. It maddened my girlfriend Flora to listen to me puzzle about Laura yet still not take the basic step of tipping the books out of their boxes, sticking labels to the spines with the date written on and arranging them in the right sequence.

But I was absorbed by my sense of possession. Flora would listen patiently, wait a few more months, then make her point again: Had I read above a third of them? Your teeth give you away. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.

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Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping. How your head is the cave, your eyes the cave mouth. How you live inside your head and only see what you want. How you only watch the shadows and make up your own meaning. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything.

Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know.