At eleven o’clock on a spring morning, John Cheever, the Chekhov of North American housing estates, writes down, in one of the 29 notebooks he left written, a very physiological paragraph: “My stomach hurts, my scrotum itches, my heart flutters, it hurts when I breathe, my right eyelid.” Some male diarists, both deceased and alive and kicking, speak naturally of the arguments of the body. Migraines, optalidones, anthropomorphic hangovers. The consequences of a crazy night or the torment of a tenacious insomnia. A drop in blood pressure, piles, kidney problems, the weight of false teeth. I think that, if they descend into the pond of the organic, they do so mostly to shock the reader; they are worth it, because they have the grace and ease to write about nocturnal emissions, the parable that draws a urination in the air or adolescent contests to see who has the longest penis. Sometimes they also record geological tests on female bodies. Or a dalliance with the maid while the plague spreads through seventeenth-century London (“… caress her breasts, in the morning, when you saw me: they are the most beautiful I have ever seen, it must be declared”, Samuel Pepys) .
Modesty
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Instead, women who write (we write) diaries are more modest in the display of the functional. And of desire. In reality, there are (or we know of) far fewer female diarists than gentlemen, perhaps because staff are often more critical of women, an issue that would cause an entire ‘spiral’. He also wanted to talk about another issue, about the red lines, about the limits between public, private and intimate that the psychiatrist established in his day Carlos Castilla del Pino. The intimate would be incommunicable. In theory, privacy and publication are mutually exclusive.
Although I am the first who likes to read them, the physiological annotations are a device by virtue of which the reader believes that he is snooping in the hidden life of another. And they are not so unspeakable notes, so scandalous: we all go through the bed and the toilet, in this case several times a day. The intimate diary is a simulacrum, but sometimes a glimmer of truth appears between the pagesof blinding light. The deepest issues, those that we are ashamed to reveal, are precisely those that unite us as a species, the most universal. Like this confession of Josep Plan in his notebook after reading a letter from Aurora: “This girl is right. I’ve lost everything, I’ve been a donkey. The tendency to tenderness leads me, to flee from ridicule, to harshness and excess».