Why I Write

I have a particular vision of Heaven. In Heaven there’s a big library. In this library — along with every book ever published in any language — there’s a special place that consists of miles and miles of shelves of special books. There’s one book for every single human being who’s ever lived. Each book is sort of a cross between a daily journal, a biography, and a multimedia experience. It contains a narrative of that person’s entire life. You can step into any moment of that person’s life and read about what they experienced and did and felt on any particular day, from that person’s point of view. Or you can read it in narrative form. You can even experience any moment of that person’s life through that person’s eyes, as in Being John Malkovich.

When I was 12 years old I read this book, and I immediately decided I wanted to start keeping a diary. After I turned 13, my parents gave me one as a Hanukkah present. It was a big blank book with lined pages and a painted cover, and it had a lock and key. I wrote my first entry on January 2, 1987. Although I haven’t written every day — somtimes days will go by without writing, sometimes a few weeks, and, rarely, a few months — I’ve been keeping a journal ever since. After I filled that first book, I bought another blank book and filled it. And then another one. Eventually I decided to start using spiral notebooks, because they’re cheaper and you feel less intimidated by grand expectations when you write in them.

And then, just over three months ago, I began a blog. I don’t know why I started it. But this is kind of comical in retrospect. At any rate, I rarely write in my spiral notebooks anymore. Now I do most of my daily chronicling here.

In the preface to his own published diary, A Diary of the Century, Edward Robb Ellis writes that there should be an American Diary Depository, a place where people can have their diaries sent after they die. Then anyone who wants can go and read about their lives. Edward Robb Ellis died in 1998. I wonder if he ever read any online journals? I wonder what he would have thought about blogs?

Keeping an online journal is kind of like NASA’s Voyager. But instead of sending out the Brandenburg Concertos and the structure of a DNA molecule, we send our thoughts and feelings and perceptions out into the ether for others to stumble across. And you know what? It’s just as important. What one person thinks about one little thing on one particular day is just as important as the greatest accomplishments in the history of humanity. Because it’s those little things that mean we exist in the first place, that make existence worthwhile.

That’s why I’m a devoted chronicler of my life and of the things that have happened in it. Because I exist. Because someday I’ll be gone, and I want it possible to be said: He lived. He was here.