yesterday

From James Wood’s How Fiction Works:

“On March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf loaded her pockets with stones and walked into the rive Ouse. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, was obsessively punctilious, and had kept a journal entry every day of his adult life, in which he recorded daily menus and car mileage. Apparently, nothing was different on the day his wife committed suicide: he entered the mileage for his car. But on this day the paper is obscured by a smudge, writes his biographer, Victoria Glendinning, “a brownish-yellow stain which has been rubbed or wiped. It could be tea or coffee or tears. The smudge is unique in all his years of neat diary-keeping.”

As I completed my diary entry for January 6th, 2021 last night, this passage stood out in my mind.

In all the years I’ve been keeping a logbook, yesterday was truly unique.