"Mental Efficiency And Other Hints to Men and Women"

A journal is better. Do not ask me to define the difference between a journal and a diary. I will not and I cannot. It is a difference that one feels instinctively.

A diary treats exclusively of one's self and one's doings; a journal roams wider, and notes whatever one has observed of interest. A diary relates that one had lobster mayonnaise for dinner and rose the next morning with a headache, doubtless attributable to mental strain.

A journal relates that Mrs. ---------- , whom one took into dinner, had brown eyes, and an agreeable trick of throwing back her head after asking a question, and gives her ac- count of her husband's strange adventures in Colorado, etc. A diary is

All I, I, I, I, itself I (to quote a line of the transcendental poetry of Mary Baker G. Eddy). A journal is the large spectacle of life.

A journal may be special or general. I know a man who keeps a journal of all cases of current superstition which he actually encounters. He began it without the slightest suspicion that he was beginning a document of astounding interest and real scientific value; but such was the fact.

In default of a diary or a journal, one may write essays (provided one has the moral courage); or one may simply make notes on the book one reads. Or one may construct anthologies of passages which have made an individual and particular appeal to one's tastes.

Anthology construction is one of the pleasantest hobbies that a person who is not mad about golf and bridge -- that is to say, a thinking person -- can possibly have; and I recommend it to those who, discreetly mistrusting their power to keep up a fast pace from start to finish, are anxious to begin their intellectual course gently and mildly.

In any event, writing -- the act of writing -- is vital to almost any scheme.

I would say it was vital to every scheme, without exception, were I not sure that some kind correspondent would instantly point out a scheme to which writing was obviously not vital.

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