So what do I think, this being my journal, and my “soap box?” I begin with talking about an area I’ve touched before, noting that I hope anyone who happens to come across this journal will read it in sympathy for the meanderings of a person with as many failings, weaknesses, and prejudices as anyone else. And a life that’s neither pure nor black, as most of ours are, morally.
As for publication, unless I happen to become “famous” somehow, which is always hoped for by most of us, but seldom very likely, someone may want to publish. More likely someone will become curious enough just to read the notebooks. That leads to the question: one, the decisions to make if published, and two, the decisions to make if not.
If not, heirs to a journal like mine may either burn it, clip it to ribbons and keep all the nice bits they like, keep it all but show it to no one outside, or give it to some archives somewhere that might be curious in whole or in part.
Generally, I’d wish it to be given in its entirety to an archive that might be curious—Moorhead State’s may be—and let it go at that. It’s not likely much will come of it, but it might give the occasional student a good chuckle. But I do agree that I worry occasionally that the things I’ve written in the mood of the moment about other people will be unjust, perhaps even libelous. I may have been in a bad mood that day. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but on the other hand, I don’t like to chop wholesale at judgments I’ve made and intend to keep! In some cases, names could be changed, I suppose. As for my sometimes long mumblings about sex, various girlfriends, a few less-than-girlfriends, masturbation, AIDS, sexual appetite, and variations, well, without that, it wouldn’t be a very “intimate journal,” would it? Everybody, or at least every younger person, spends the majority of their time thinking about love and sex anyway, so to leave it out of a journal is radically misleading.
In general I don’t want to hurt others by my fleeting thoughts—but if they were turds and deserve a few lumps, well, so be it. As for “libeling” myself, after I’m gone it won’t make any difference to me, and I don’t think I owe to any possible heirs a whitewashed picture of my life. I’ll hope they do me a favor and remember me as I was, with warts.
In case of publication, all the above holds true, but I expect this will have to be drastically cut—no fool will read “unabridged” diaries of R.C.
So I hope editors choose to keep the parts judged best for their writing—I try to do my best to write as well as I can, but of course, never revise—and perhaps for some comments that can throw a light on life as it was for someone in their 20s in the 1970s, or in 1980s, as a student, a teacher, a traveller, comments on the issues of the times, what people were talking about, whatever, and how a young person typical in many ways, not typical in others, lived and thought in relation to the society of the period. That kind of thing can’t be judged now, not be me or anyone else, for the import of certain events only becomes clear in relation to their sequel (who would have thought Hitler’s 1923 “beer hall putsch” meant anything?). But censorship to protect me or emphasize some “values” one way or another I didn’t really live is not fair to me or to readers, I’d think. As there are too few honest obituaries, there are too few honest journals in print.
Death sanctifies.
— March 6, 1989, Marseille, France
OtD 