At least my cheese will survive.

From How Diaries Evolved From Lists to Personal Histories by John Dickerson.  The subheading is Roland Allen’s new book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper explores the history of journals and why we need them.

Roland Allen has written a book and is being interviewed by John Dickerson.  

Roland Allen: It’s really interesting. There’s one big question at the heart of it, which no one’s ever answered, which is why people who were using notebooks all the time—in Italy, for instance, but also Germany, France, everywhere in Europe—for hundreds of years, yet no one keeps what we think of as a personal diary.

So, when I go home tonight, I’m going to write a diary about our conversation, about my journey to work, about how I feel, about the argument I had with so-and-so, and how I feel about it. And that’s normal for me and it’s not an unusual thing to do. But it took people a long time to think of it, what we think of as a really simple idea. They didn’t do it in Florence at all; they didn’t do it in France or Germany. It seems to have started in rural England around the 1560s, which partly fills my heart with joy, because some innovation actually happens in England! So it was nice to bring the story back there.

But why it happens? I really struggle to put my finger on a reason why. And interestingly, the real historians of the diary—who tend to be French and who also locate it there—they really struggled as well. They can’t find anything particularly unusual about England in the 1550s, 1560s. It was not particularly turbulent. There was religious tension, but there was religious tension everywhere. People were reading and writing much more, ditto all over Europe—who knows?

Later, talking about the great diarist, Samuel Pepys.

 He’s fantastic because he is a compulsive diary taker with absolutely no filter, so he writes it all, and he’s pleasantly human. He does bad things and he regrets them, he’s clearly a great bloke to know, he has loads and loads of friends, they’re constantly singing and playing music round at his house, there’s a lot of wine and women and song. But he’s also right at the heart of government. If you like, he’s one of the leading civil servants of his day. When he gets to deal with the Duke of York, it’s a big event for him, but it does happen. So, he’s right at the top of English society, or British society, as well as being this compulsive diary writer.

His account of the Great Fire is terrific, and the details in it are fantastic. You can track the whole thing, because he was so well-informed and he was there while decisions were being made about, “Are we going to blow up these houses before they burn down? Are we going to pull houses down to make fire bricks?” He was there for those conversations. And then he also says, “And then I raced off in order to bury my Parmesan cheese in the back garden, so in case the house burns down, at least my cheese will survive.”