On Keeping a Journal

I think that writing in a journal or a diary is becoming a lost art. It seems like the secrets we used to record on the pages of our diaries, the most intimate details of our lives, are now broadcast for all the world to see -- on blogs, on social networking pages, on tweets, and on chats. I'm not willing to bare my soul to that extent.

My own journal contains two entries for 2006, nothing for 2007, and three entries for 2008. This is because, in 2005, I made a conscious decision to stop writing in my journal and devote that energy to writing letters to my children instead, as my four grown-up offspring found themselves literally in the four corners of the world. I rationalized that my mails and emails contained enough information for a biographer to reconstruct my life, if anybody really wanted to.

I stubbornly ignored the fact that, while my family letters contained news and the occasional patriarchal expostulation, they concealed my feelings and some of the more private events in my life. In fact, the past six years have been a brain-rattling, roller-coaster sequence of ups and downs: financially, spiritually, and emotionally. I don't want to commit the ascending parts or the high points to paper, fearing that although the words will remain, the hopes and the joys will be replaced again by disappointment and discouragement. I don't want to record the descents or the low points because, honestly, there are some details about this journey that I do not want to remember.

My online persona is carefully edited and managed, so that the rest of the world does not see the roller-coaster trajectory of my life or the framework that it is built upon.

But it's time for me to write in my journal again. Call it a declaration of hope, if you will.

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I have a friend who keeps his journal on his computer. He stores a backup copy of his journal online, somewhere in "the cloud." Good for him. I can't do that.

Corporations and government agencies have thousands, billions, of records, stored on old computer tapes in climate-controlled storage. As long as the climate control keeps working, those magnetic tapes will last for a long time. However, the machines to read those tapes wore out a decade ago, and nobody is making any new ones. For all the good it did to store those records so carefully, nobody will ever be able to read them.

Today, with our "modern" computers, we face other risks with anything we commit to the computer: power failure, battery failure, OS failure, hard disk failure, CD/DVD damage, and Internet shutdown.

On the other hand, another piece of the Codex Sinaiticus was recently discovered in the binding of an old book at the Monastery of St. Catherine, at the bottom of the Sinai peninsula. The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the oldest copies of the Bible, having been written between 325 and 360 A.D. It was written in ink on sheets of parchment. The largest portion of the Codex Siniaticus is in the British Library; however, the monks liked to reuse old parchment, and so pieces of it keep showing up in other old books. It's practically indestructible.

I have been observing this "ancient vs. modern" trend for several years now. Technologists keep trying to come up with new archival document formats, to replace ink on parchment, but so far they have not been very successful. Nothing has proven to last even one tenth as long as ink on parchment, except maybe ink on paper. Since parchment is rather scarce and expensive these days, I'm going to write my journal by hand, in ink, on paper.

Call me a Luddite

I like tech toys. Normally, I'm a first adopter of the newest technologies. However, I have resisted a few tech toys, and will probably continue to resist them until I am forced to use them.

First: PDAs. I owned an HP100LX Palmtop PC way back in the late 1990s. It was a nice machine. I installed WordPerfect 5.1 and some other good DOS programs on it. I wrote and published a book using (mostly) the HP100LX. I replaced it with an HP Jornada, another so-called "palmtop PC." At one point, I totally replaced my paper day planner with the 100LX and the Jornada. After two and a half years, I went back to the paper day planner. I have steadfastly refused to own or use any of the palm/stylus/fingertip based products that have come and gone since then.

Why? Well, I can find names in a paper index faster than in an Address Book application on a PDA. I can see more information at a glance about an upcoming meeting, or past meeting notes, on paper than with a PDA. But most importantly, paper doesn't spontaneously reboot, abort memory, scramble memory, or run out of juice at critical times. And the ROI isn't there for a PDA, compared with the cost of paper refills, pens and other day planner supplies.

Second: Blackberries and other fancy cellular phones. I just use my mobile phone to talk with people. I don't text that much, I don't take very many pictures, and this latest cellphone wants me to pay to play a full game of Tetris. I admit that I do covet the Apple iPhone, and I would love to have one, but I would mostly use it as a classical telephone.

Third: MP3 players and iTunes. No, I don't want one. I can tell the difference between CD sound quality and MP3 sound quality. I prefer the CD sound, thank you -- or even a good, high quality cassette tape, played on a good player. I'm not such a Luddite as to say I prefer vinyl records (you know, the big black CDs that use a contact stylus) over CDs, because a well-mastered CD has sound quality equal or superior to the best vinyl record. But MP3s don't really do it for me.

Fourth: (until today) Blogs. I'm about four years late getting into the game. I've had my own website for a long time, but I've resisted setting up a blog until now. There are several reasons, and maybe I'll go into them another day.

So, you ask, why am I a Luddite?

I work with computers every day. I used to make computers and printers, or at least the components that went into them. I write video games. I'm an accomplished computer programmer. You'd think that I would be all for technology, as far as I can push it.

No. Why balance your checkbook electronically, when a paper one will do? Why buy special recipe management software, when a handwritten recipe book will do? Why buy an electric toothbrush, when a manual one will do? Why spend all that extra money buying an electronic anything, when you can save money and do just fine with the non-electronic, or non-electric, alternative?

I used to drive a 30-year-old Ford Mustang to work. There's something infinitely satisfying about controlling the car, and feeling it respond, through the mechanical linkages rather than through a central computer and electrical wiring. When I mashed down on the accelerator pedal, a jet on the carburetor squirted raw gasoline into the intake manifold and opened the carburetor's throat wide. When the cylinders got that raw gas and took a big gulp of air, the car jumped forward like a lion on the attack, with not even an instant's hesitation. With the new electronic cars, you have to wait for the central computer to intercept the motion of the accelerator pedal and decide what to do about it. And if today's car runs rough or has trouble starting, you can't open the hood and fix the problem with a big screwdriver and a pair of pliers.

I've always been a supporter of Project Gutenberg, and I've read several classic works as ebooks, downloaded from http://www.gutenberg.org/ . But I get eyestrain trying to read for too long from a computer screen. Paper still works better than electronic displays for long periods of reading. And there's nothing as satisfying in the tech world as curling up on the couch with a comforter, a mug of hot chocolate, and a good book.