This calming down is perhaps the main reason why I keep a diary. It is incredible how the written sentence can calm and tame a man. The sentence is always something different from the man writing it. It stands before him as something alien, a sudden solid wall which cannot be leaped over. One might walk around it, but before one even arrives on the other side, there is a new wall at a sharp angle to the first, a new sentence, no less alien, on less solid or high, and likewise beckoning one to walk around it. Gradually, a labyrinth arises, in which the builder just barely knows his way. He is calmed by it's tangled paths.
　　The people closest to a writer could not stand hearing everything that has excited him. Excitement is catching, and others hopefully have their own lives, which cannot consist only of someone else's excitement, otherwise they would suffocate. Then there are the things one cannot tell anybody, even the closest people, because one is too ashamed. It is not good if they are not articulated at all: it is not good if they pass into oblivion. The mechanisms one uses to make life easy are far too well developed. First a man says, somewhat timidly “I really couldn't help it”. And then, in the twinkling of an eye, the matter is forgotten. To escape this unworthiness, one ought to write the thing down, and then much later, perhaps years later, when self-complacence is dripping out of all one's pores, when one least expects it, one is suddenly, and to one's horror, confronted with it. “I was capable of that, I did that”.
　　The man who truly wants to know everything will learn best from his own example. But he must not spare himself, he must treat himself as though he was someone else, not less but more harshly.
　　The bleakness of many diaries is due to the total lace of anything to be calmed down. One can hardly believe it, but some people are satisfied with everything around them, even with a world about to collapse. Others, despite all vicissitudes, are satisfied with themselves.
　　Thus, as we can see, calm as a function of diary is no great shakes. It is a calming of the moment, of momentary weakness, which clears the day for work, and nothing more. In the long run, a diary had the reverse effect, it does not permit one to go to sleep, it interferes with the natural process of transfiguring a past which is left to itself, it keeps one awake and mordant.