The reward: you could have your words lovingly selected and explicated in The New Yorker, as Darryl Pinckney does for his late friend Susan Sontag in his review of Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963. He writes of her diaries as evidence of a "ferocious will," a voice that "never aged, perhaps in part because she did not lose her avidity for experience." She wrote:

Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

And, more weirdly:

I don’t know what my real feelings are [...] That’s why I’m so interested in moral philosophy, which tells me (or at least turns me toward) what my feelings ought to be. Why worry about analyzing the crude ore, I reason, if you know how to produce the refined metal directly?

Pinckney's treatment of Sontag's diaries shows a brilliant mind, never at ease, always churning up not only new ideas but new selves. But the risk of keeping a diary is that it might fall into the hands of someone like Sam Anderson, who in the latest New York Magazine describes Sontag's life as "happiness-starved," calls her return to her first female lover "a sad circularity," and says, "if some researcher ever wants to study the connection between insecurity and intellectualism, Sontag’s journals would be a very good place to start."

It's hard not to prefer Pinckney's version — the journal as place of self-creation — to Anderson's journal as repository of inner anguish. A diary offers not only the chance to make a private inner life for yourself — it also allows you to be, for a time, self-absorbed. And since self-absorption is still much less accepted for women than for men, perhaps it's no wonder that Anderson wants to call it "insecurity." But writing a diary doesn't have to mean scrawling "nobody likes me" with a Hello Kitty pen; it can be a way to acknowledge that you are an interesting person and deserve to be written about — even if nobody but you ever reads it.

The Book Of Lists [The New Yorker]
Wake Up, Little Susie [New York Magazine]

While people tossed off cheap jokes about Palin and Rove — the past eight years and McCain's campaign were reduced to a gently farcical in-joke — Joan Didion was different. As anyone who's seen her speak knows, she's as physically self-contained as she is in manner: tiny, yes, but also uninterested in taking up much space with force of personality. When she speaks, it's flat, slow, straightforward: she never seems to enjoy hearing herself speak much. Unlike the other panelists, she'd prepared a written statement. Characteristically, it was detached, even cold. She started by describing the "unexpressable uneasiness" she and some others had felt early on in the campaign. Why? "We were getting what we wanted," she continued, meaning, a smart, qualified, decent candidate the Eastern elite could get behind. And yet the frenzy surrounding Obama made her uneasy — both the sense that he was a young person's candidate, "a generational thing we couldn't understand" and the unthinking embrace of "naivete transformed to hope, partisanism as consumerism." Didion bridled at the wanton use of "transformational" and said she couldn't count the number of times she heard the 60's evoked "by people who apparently had no memory that the 60s" didn't involve decking babies out in political onesies.

Didion was at pains to say that she did not think any of this was Obama's doing, nor to his tastes. He would, she speculated "welcome healthy realism" and achievable expectations. In our frenzy, we are doing him a disservice, expecting miracles "at a time when the nation can least afford easy answers." She recalled, the day after the election, an overexcited newscaster declaring that we now possess "the congratulations of all the nations." She likened this to the naivete of thinking we'd be regarded as beloved saviors in Iraq. But, she ended, "in the irony-free zone that our country has become, this is not what people wanted to hear."

Clearly, no one really did. At once, the other panelists were back to comparing Obama's election to the fall of the Berlin Wall (Pinckney), evoking Lincoln (Delbanco), celebrating "the passing away of religious tyranny" (Wills, I believe.) And they weren't wrong, of course, but the palpable self-congratulation in that room by some very fine minds was worrisome and uncomfortable and lacking in humility, and so Didion's measured caution was more reassuring than all the other rhetoric combined.

Afterwards I saw someone I knew slightly. She'd loved the event, found it wise, felt the panel had put into words all her feelings. "Joan Didion was kind of a downer, though," she said. The thing is that Didion, studying current euphoria with such a distanced eye but still able to feel moved, made me feel more optimistic then than anyone else.

Related: What Happens Next? [NYPL]