Word: diarist
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...carnal desires. He reads and translates erotic passages from Juvenal. When these sessions succeed, he writes: Masturbatus sum. Shortly after he arrives, he develops a crush on Fanny Cooper, the daughter-in-law of the local Methodist preacher, whose husband then providentially dies of a rattlesnake bite. As the diarist's history slowly emerges, he becomes that quintessential hero of American literature, the self-exile on the run from his past...
...most interesting member of The Class (as Segal and diarist Andrew Eliot, the sometime narrator insist upon calling it) is Theodore Lambros, the commuter who aspires to be a Harvard classics professor. Ted pays his way by working at his father's restaurant, picking up a preppy wife along the way, and then plunges into the rat race that is the tenure track. As a classicist who taught at Harvard and Princeton before winding up at Yale, Segal knows the intimate details of the hard-fought battles that surround lifetime appointments including the much-desired favorable reviews in the Confy...
...race of time 'Time's winged chariot hurrying near'--Does it stay it?" "It" was diary writing, and the question was rhetorical. Of course the entries could stop time, by providing a mirror of the self and a method of recapturing the past. That is a truth every diarist apprehends, first instinctively and then with the evidence of the page. In this critical anthology, Thomas Mallon, a professor of English at Vassar, offers hundreds of such proofs, from diaries as old as Samuel Pepys' and as contemporary as Graham Greene's and Jean Harris...
...servant: on March 31, 1668, "Yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra me genu and did poner mi mano sub her jupes and toca su thigh." Yet Pepys' journals are far more than an account of appetites satisfied or denied; along his way the diarist recounts the coronation of Charles II, the Great Plague and the Great Fire...
...riot . . ." These and scores of similar entries defy decades and space. They might have been written centuries ago by candlelight or last night by fluorescent lamp. As A Book of One's Own amply demonstrates, a diary is a kind of looking glass. At first it reflects the diarist. But it ends by revealing the reader...