online: 26 august 2013 modified: 23, 28 august 2013 23 august 2013 sampling the diary
reading almost at random
...dissatisfied with nearly everything this evening... i began to read this diary from 2001 to the present... sampling not strictly by random number but more casually... choosing each jump intuitively... and occasionally choosing one or two entries i remembered vividly such as 'death of a tree'...
...what did i find?
...for an hour or so i was disappointed: what i read seemed less interesting than when i wrote it... but some (like 'a duck flying' written in 1984 with some knowledge of aerodynamics) still seem very interesting... but perhaps the ones revealing ignorance are also interesting as such!
...i've never sampled the whole diary before... never in a decade or two tried to see what i'm writing... but now that i have done so i am somewhat discouraged by the majority of entries... and pleased only by some... (yet i was very pleased when i read the whole of Year One in a single volume 'printed on demand'*)
...so i think i'll continue... if only from habit... though perhaps i'll write fewer...
...and more often choose events that i know of in detail...
...but the lover of chance may still be drawn to events of which he is unfamiliar... and looks at... or listens to... or remembers... more intently... before writing whatever comes to mind... or to finger as if without any thought... as if the things that he attends to are writing themselves... he hopes...
...and now i feel happier... more a part of the world!
*Ursula and Tansy Huws have kindly made a print-on-demand version of the first year of the digital diary (march 2001 to march 2002)...
...an unedited version is now available (via lulu.com) from this web address:
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