Just started Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest yesterday, and I see that writing itself is going to be a preoccupation. It’s interesting to think of blogging, and other forms of journal-keeping, in light of what he says early on about his experiment of keeping a diary:
When I first sat down before this child’s copy-book I tried to concentrate, to withdraw into myself as though I were examining my conscience before confession. And yet my real conscience was not revealed by that inner light — usually so dispassionate and penetrating, passing over details, showing up the whole. It seemed to skim the surface of another consciousness, previously unknown to me, a cloudy mirror in which I feared that a face might suddenly appear. Whose face? Mine, perhaps. A forgotten, rediscovered face…
When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one’s own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears…
Interesting. He’s zeroing in on prayer as a qualitatively different phenomenon than writing; it’s more than the psychological relief of merely “getting things into words,” and governed by a different consciousness.
He returns to the subject here:
I had thought it [the diary] might become a kind of communion between God and myself, an extension of prayer… But why record in black and white matters which should be dismissed as fast as they happen? The worst of it is I find in these outpourings such solace that this alone should suffice to put me on my guard. As I sit here scribbling in the lamplight, pages no one will ever read, I get the feeling of an invisible presence which surely could not be God — rather a friend made in my image, although distinct from me, a separate entity. Last night I became intensely aware of this presence and suddenly caught myself turning my head towards some imaginary listener, with a longing to cry that shamed me.
