Writers writing to themselves …

… On the Journals of Famous Writers | Literary Hub.

… Over the past few months, I have lived within the journals of heroes and strangers, compared daily word counts with Virginia Woolf, trembled before Alma Mahler’s social calendar, pitied Kafka’s lovers. I’ve read pages and pages with interest and empathy, with boredom and more than a little shame (some entries are akin to seeing your favorite authors’ dirty underthings). But having traversed that stack of lives, what remains more than anything, tingling like a phantom limb, is a sensation of stillness: the journal as the eye of the writing life’s storm. More than ever, it seems to me a womb, a respite—and if that respite isn’t literature, I would argue it is literature’s wellspring.