New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009

I’ve given a lot of thought to New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009, and to the way that it’s organized, and whether that organization system is a strength or a weakness. My wife gave me the book as a spontaneous gift. She had picked it up at a bookstore while browsing, and I thumbed through it some there with her, and was absolutely intrigued by the way that the book is put together. So, responding to my immediate enthusiasm, she bought the book for me. Isn’t she wonderful?

By way of a brief review, the book is a collection of diary entries from over a hundred different diarists, spanning four centuries. Some of the authors are well known, and some are unknown; some have only one diary entry included in the collection, and some have dozens of entries. The book is organized by day of the year, rather than by strict chronology, so January 1 has diary entries from four different authors, ranging from 1844 to 1953. January 2 has two entries, from 1850 and 1880. You get the idea. The entries for each day are organized chronologically, but that chronology starts fresh each day, with an abrupt jerk back to the past, like the platen on a typewriter racing back to the left side of the page at the end of each line.

So, here are the consequences from that structural scheme. Major events, that last for years, like wars, tend to be continuously present. For example, the Civil War is mentioned every month, and may actually be mentioned weekly. It’s like we’ve all become unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim, and our pasts are all continuously with us. The reader is always responding to the stresses leading up to the Civil War, and always exposed to the threats of British invasion during the Revolutionary War. The experience is interesting, but it doesn’t give us the flow from one event to another. We are jerked back and forth, and the move from historical cause to effect is lost.

This would have been a better collection had it been organized in the traditional way. We would have begun with the very earliest entries from Henry Hudson and Robert Juet as they recorded their exploration of the area in 1609. This would have set the stage for the eventual settling of the area, and then the challenges of settling the colony would have gradually become tensions leading to the Revolutionary War. The book could have told a historical story through the disparate diary entries.

In telling that historical story, the editor, Teresa Carpenter, wouldn’t have lost the glimpses into day to day New York life. These interludes would have nestled nicely in their original historical location, and offered glimpses into the life in the midst of the crises. One very memorable entry was a lament by an author who resented how people seemed to go about their daily lives so carelessly during the Civil War. That entry would have had more punch had it rested directly among other diary entries from the same time period, making for a better history, and not losing the charm of the unexpected amid the larger historical headlines.