On Diary

Writing While Walking

WRITING WHILE WALKING Little, if anything, is remembered about Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaı̈s (1766–1845). He gained some notoriety for his philosophical treatise Des compensations dans les destinées humaines (1809). After 1850, he was forgotten. Only Pyrenees enthusiasts occasionally remembered him long enough to ridicule Un mois de séjour dans les Pyrénées (Paris, 1809), a book that I am going to praise. In the 1970s, Michel Baude rediscovered and studied his extraordinary anniversary diary: from 1811 to 1844, Azaı̈s kept 365 parallel diaries, one for each day of the year. He was a second-rate philosopher, but a sort of genius of the personal diary. In any event, he was a pioneer: what he did had never been tried before, had never even been imagined. And few have done anything like it since. Let me tell you about his first diary, which he kept from 1798 to 1803, a copy of which is held in the Bibliothèque de l’Institut in Paris (over two thousand pages in eight volumes). What a shame for us, and for him, that the original diary has been lost! One of his inventions was outdoor writing, just as the impressionists did outdoor painting. What he was after, as much as authenticity of place, was the authenticity of the moment. He was seeking instantaneity. Madame de Charrière teased Benjamin Constant for chopping his letters into pieces by noting down the time when he wrote each part. She said that it was no longer a journal, but an houral. So let us tease Azaı̈s for trying to write a minutal. Perhaps you need to have been in prison to dream of writing outdoors. Perhaps you need to have had a brush with death to make you want to seize the very sharpest tip of the moment. After publishing a counter-revolutionary pamphlet in 1797, our Azaı̈s, musician, teacher, and philosopher, was forced to go into hiding after the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797). He lived as a recluse for more than two years, until May 1800. It was a gentle enough seclusion, first at the Tarbes hospital, where former nuns who were also opposed to the Revolution hid him in their “pharmacy,” and then with sympathizing families. At the hospital he read Saint Augustine, reflected on time and “compensations in human destinies,” and after a year thought of keeping a diary. He started it on 4 September 1798. At first planned as a moral guide (he called it “my little monitor”), this diary quickly became the “Écrire en marchant.” Lalies 28 (2008). Writing While Walking 123 barometer of his love life (there were girls in the families that took him in), the confidant of his reveries in nature (he sometimes went out on the sly), and especially a laboratory for his ideas and a rough draft of future works. He was amazed by the plasticity of the “diary” form, so much so that one day he wrote enthusiastically, “If we had two lives, I would spend the first one writing my diary” (6 October 1801)! Keeping a diary, like writing a letter, required paper, a stable backing to support the paper, a pen (goose feather sharpened with a penknife), and ink in an inkwell. This was an indoor occupation. There were traveling “writing desks,” small sets of portable furniture that could hold everything one needed for writing, but it was still necessary to perch somewhere. Even when traveling , people wrote while seated on a chair in front of a table or something that served that purpose. Look at plates II and III of the article on “Écritures” from the Encyclopédie, and you will see that writing is a serious affair. But, you will ask, what about the pencil? Just because they have the same name, you must not confuse the pencils that were traditionally used to draw (a sort of chalk or pastel) with the pencil that was invented at the end of the sixteenth century in England. Ultimately perfected in 1795 by Conté, this pencil was a lead inside a wooden sleeve and could be used to write rough drafts. Its use spread quickly in the early nineteenth century, but at Tarbes, in the final years of the eighteenth century, they were little known. And they did not do away with the need to sit down or lean on something. It is a shame that Azaı̈s’s original diary...