![]() Collectively, we’re revisiting the notebooks of the politician Samuel Pepys, who blogged the bubonic plague’s arrival in London, in 1665, and lingering over “ A Journal of the Plague Year,” the proto–pandemic novel, from 1722, by Daniel Defoe. We’re transcribing what we’re cooking, eating, reading, listening to, and streaming. Our plight isn’t comparable to Frank’s stoppered girlhood, but the coronavirus has made us fearful and helpless, and we’ve entered an age of diaries: “ coronavirus diaries” and “ pandemic journals” and “ quarantine diaries” and “ Wuhan diaries” and “ coronavirus-quarantine diaries,” in the press and outside of it, as historians and mental-health professionals alike urge us toward self-documentation. Perhaps she could even outsmart time-by organizing it, occupying it, smoothing it into a continuous flow. She could manifest her inner world in paper and ink she could shape her not-knowing into language. Forced within, both physically and psychologically, Frank seems to have countered that retreat with an exteriorization. Some authors avoid writing about what they “don’t really know yet,” but, for Frank, discovering what she thought and felt, or at least managing her uncertainty, may have been the whole point. It is painful to consider the lack-of connection, stimulation, solace, control-out of which Frank’s diary arose. ![]() A few weeks earlier, the thirteen-year-old had referred plaintively to the condition “that prompted me to keep a diary in the first place: I don’t have a friend.” She wouldn’t live to see the readers who “no doubt want to hear” what she thought. “Well, all I can say is that I don’t really know yet.” Only a day or so had passed since the Franks had fled their house in Amsterdam for a “secret annex” in the back of an office building-a harsh precaution against the harsher menace of Nazism. “You no doubt want to hear what I think of being in hiding,” Anne Frank wrote in (and to) her diary, which she’d named Kitty, on July 11, 1942. ![]()
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