What should be in a diary? That’s a silly question. A diary is a personal thing. Whoever writes it can record whatever suits their fancy. Diaries can be therapy tools with which we work through our feelings in real time, by retelling them to ourselves. They can be simple lists of events and appointments, holiday destinations and books read. We can practice our narrative skills there, or record our unedited stream of consciousness, knowing that no one will read it anyways.

Until you die and people start going through your stuff, that is. Reading your notes, your diaries, your letters. Treating your personal writing as a source of information about not only what happened to you, but even about other people’s lives.

Let’s not even go into the ethics of it for now. This is about the experience of a biographer. Of a historian? I guess what I am trying to do is history of sorts.

These are the most frustrating moments, when you are trying to hunt down someone so elusive who left almost nothing behind. And then a pile of correspondence you find in an archive and traveled many miles to see turns out to be dozens of letters about the most mundane things ever. Dear Sir, have you received my previous letter? I sent you an article. Dear Madam, please accept my apologies for taking so long to respond. I am still waiting for that article. Eight years of that (Hosiasson-Twardowski correspondence, I’m looking at you). Trying to get to know a person from that becomes even more of an interpretative dance of assumptions than usual.

And the diaries, oh, the diaries. There’s the gender problem, of course, in that women were (are?) more likely to think that their lives are not worth recording, so they wouldn’t do that. Then there are other decisions. When it comes to Maria and Stanisław Ossowski, it seems that both of them kept diaries. His is now being edited thoroughly into a series of books. Maria, according to a number of people who knew her, simply destroyed hers. She said that her diary was a dialogue with herself, where she wrote about everything that was important – so she could not leave that for other people to see. As someone who is interested in the people and not necessarily so much in their academic personas, you groan with frustration. It makes you want to write novels instead of biographies: if you can’t get to a person, let’s just make them up from scratch.

Then there is Carnap, who did keep a diary for decades, sometimes very personal and very narrative. But – of course! – when it comes to the dates and places that matter the most to me, his notes are almost skeletal. Miss Hosiasson came to Vienna. I went to Warsaw, ticket cost this much and the hotel room had a bathroom.

With all these experiences, I started looking at my daily life just a little differently. Not because I intend to be famous and important one day, so my diary needs to be as personal as possible. But who could I be frustrating long after I am gone? Who of the (not yet?) great people I meet are not getting a mention at the end of the day? Whose biographers am I robbing of insight?