As a long-time journaler, I can attest to the many benefits of keeping a journal. Remembering what day a certain event occurred. Looking back at who you were in comparison to who you are now. Releasing negative emotions or moving past setbacks once you have transferred them to the page. I have kept journals periodically throughout my life and sometimes I like to read an entry from two years ago after finishing my current entry in order to reflect on time and the changing nature of life.
But I can also attest to the benefits of reading other people’s journals. No, I don’t mean go rifle through your significant other’s journal to uncover what they really think of you -- I consider the privacy of friends’ and acquaintances’ journals sacrosanct. But reading the published journals of historical figures seems harmless enough, the passage of time having blotted out the hurts or embarrassments the material could have caused (that idea alone is one of the chief pleasures of reading a journal, the assurance that your dramas and dilemmas, valid though they may be, are temporary).
In particular, I’ve been enjoying reading the unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath. Of the 600-plus pages, I’ve read the first 140, which cover Plath’s college years at Smith College from 1950 through 1953. The experience has been particularly meaningful because I, like Plath, aspire to be an author and poet, in addition, I am just a 19-year-old college student myself. It disarms and comforts to read her wish, “I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost… but won’t. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.” Plath committed suicide too soon to know it, but now she ranks among the greatest poets that people “mouth” in times of strife or inspiration. And then there’s the chill of realizing I feel the same way; I want my poetry to be quoted in relation to the complexities of life too, and it might happen for me just as it happened for Plath because I, too, write that wish in my journal.
An even more chilling instance of Plath’s youthful ambitions juxtaposing eerily with her grim demise comes with Plath’s speculation, “But the life of a Willa Cather, a Lillian Helman, a Virginia Woolf --- would it not be a series of rapid ascents and probing descents into shades and meaning …?” Plath’s name often comes up in reverential tones alongside Virginia Woolf; her putting her head in the oven comes up with the same infamy as Woolf’s walking into the River Ouse with stones in her pockets. But Plath, eighteen and writing in her Smith dormitory, wrote this with enormous ambition and unknowingness.
Furthermore, these premonitions of Plath’s literary success are delivered alongside thoroughly relatable sentiments and rants. One entry opens, “I can’t resist writing about my date last Saturday night,” and proceeds to dissect the evening in great detail, the way people mentally dissect dates and other social occasions in order to comprehend the social order they find themselves in. Another long entry ends “in three days you have your first mid year exam and you’d much rather read anything but what you have to, but you do have to, and you will, although you’ve already wasted two hours writing stream-of-consciousness in here.” Writing your thoughts is a good emotional outlet. Writing your thoughts is an even better means of procrastinating on homework. I know this, and Sylvia Plath knew it too.
Ultimately, reading the journal a lauded poet kept during her college years has been useful. It proves that everyone, no matter how talented, suffers the same insecurities and doubts. It proves that no one can predict the outcome of their life. It proves we are not alone in feeling alone. It is beautiful and sad to think a woman who lived such a lonely life, isolated by mental anguish, shared the same thoughts (in her highly unique voice, of course) with so many people, who might actually feel less alone after reading her journals.
