private diary · plain cloth · with original elastic
the diary records four years in the life of a man who keeps a
small lighthouse on a coast that
is not named. the entries are short — never more than a
paragraph, often a single line — and refuse the usual material
of diaries. he writes the weather, the number of ships sighted,
the colour of the water, the day the gulls returned. he does
not write his own name. he does not write the names of others.
private impressions are never
attempted. when he is sad he writes that the lamp burned poorly.
when he is glad he writes that the lamp burned well. the
reader, after some pages, learns to read his weather as
weather, but also as a long, careful
autobiography in a language nearly without nouns.
the last entry is the day before the keeper leaves the post.
it says only that the wick was trimmed. the diary was found in
a tin, in a cupboard, in a station that no longer exists.
marginalia · pasted in, in different ink he kept us out, even from this. but you can see him in the pauses between entries. the days he did not write were the days he was happy.