I’ve recently discovered the writing of Kathleen Jamie and have been moved and stimulated by her book Surfacing. A passage encapsulates the experience of mining my diaries for this blog.
‘The old notebook retrieved, I closed the box… I had my hand written notes, and also – in another box – some evocative black-and-white photographs…’
‘Then they were on my desk with their curled corners and thumbed edges, real things from a time before the digital age. Archaic objects with material existence in the world. Photographs, developed by hand in a darkroom. The handwritten notebook with its picture postcard on the front. Museum pieces, but they seemed like old friends, which they were, for what is a photograph or a notebook? Reaching out to a future self, the future self of next week or half a lifetime. I was the utterly unimaginable future person the notes had been made for, although I didn’t know it back then.’ 2019 edition, p. 192