CAN WE PENETRATE A SOUL?

The internet has dramatically transformed how we communicate. Gone are the days when we put pen to paper, popped the results in a postbox and had them delivered a few days later by a postman. But when I have a writing block, I still resort to pen and paper but it has to be a particular type of pen and a particular type of paper – ideally a Faber-Castell or uniPiN pen (fountain pens even better) and a Clairefontaine or Atoma paper – with carefully removable pages which can be pinned back in.

The letters (and diaries) of famous people have been collected and published in attempts to reveal their character. How does this change when we can communicate instantaneously? When the Russians invaded Ukraine and started a bloody war, I was moved to start a file to try to celebrate LIFE

Violence and viruses have snuffed the life from millions of people these past few years. The increasing sight of mass graves suggest a growing indifference to the value of the individual life. Remember how easily people talked during COVID of the “culling” of the elderly – adding the phrase to the euphemisms which imperial governments have been using increasingly in the past half-century such as “friendly fire” and “collateral damage”. No wonder that we can’t share Steven Pinker’s optimism about human aggression. Beneath our civilised veneer, we don’t question the readiness with which Russian leaders have been willing to sacrifice millions of individuals over the past century.

“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic” was first attributed to Stalin in 1947 as ‘If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics’.

I for one will never forget a conversation with a young Russian interpreter in St Petersburg in January 1991 when I was on a WHO mission to the city - when she spoke about how meaningless life was for her as a Russian.

With Ukraine (and now Gaza) descending into hell, I recently stumbled via an article and book about Ukraine’s cultural heritage into the field of memoirs which I last posted about some years ago. Somehow, against such slaughter, it seemed appropriate to assert that life has value – and should be lived to the full.The website Lives Retold reminded me of Theodor Zeldin’s great venture of self-portraits.

I started with a list of autobiographies simply in the order in which I remembered them – but then realised that intellectual biographies often get to parts sometimes not realised by autobiographers themselves. And Naomi Mitchinson reminded me that Diaries can do the same.

Since then, whenever I come across a reference to a memoir, diary, collected 

letters or indeed biographies I try to find the book, download it (with the url) 

and add a few notes to remind me (and the reader) of its significance. These, 

with some notes from Paul Theroux about his favourite reading, now amount to 

more than 40 pages which you can find at Diaries, Letters and Memoirs