Thursday, December 18, 2003
OTHER BLOGS:
I have been interested in blogs for awhile and I have been inspired by this one for almost one year :
SAMUEL PEPYS DIARY
It was written about 340 years ago and I have been reading it, an entry at a time, since last January. There is no magic time to start; but it would be fun, if you are interested, to start with Sam on January 1st of 2004.
The site is heavily cross referenced and I have a recent book Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin; a wonderful biography, to fill in the missing parts. I do not allow myself to read Tomalin ahead of the Diary's action.
Of course, Sam did not know that he was among the first bloggers. There were many diarists of this time and earlier; but none of these demonstrated the uniquely open personal quality of Pepys' work.
Tomalin says "Other diaries of the seventeenth century were devoted to the spiritual life, to politics or to accounts of travel and sightseeing, and even those that do give some details of domestic life are discreet [about detail]." "What is extraordinary is that [Pepys] went into areas no one else considered recording, looked at himself with as much curiosity as he looked at the exterior world, weighing himself and the world equally in the balance."
Now this is a 'blog'; a good model to follow.
Oh, incidentally: if you decide to read the entries day by day, the Diary covers eleven years of Sam's life as, coincidentally, it will cover yours.
I will be 77 when I am done.
The Pepy's site and its readers are committed to the entire project. You could buy the Diary in book form but I am told that it takes a four foot hunk of shelf.
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