Twelve Days in the Year

I’m in Bochum, for a conference starting tomorrow on Bier in der Antike; wonderful to be back in Germany rather than just getting fifteen minutes’ sanity from the Taggesschau every evening (time devoted to Johnson shenanigans in the last fortnight? Zero), lovely to be back on Eurostar, at least once you’re past the security and passport queues that make the experience barely distinguishable from an airport whereas once it was completely calm and relaxed. But the reason for writing this is not to make you all jealous about the beer thing, or to grumble about Brexit again, but to announce a new writing project.

My reading for the train – in between the unavoidable emails and a PGR student upgrade work sample – was Christa Wolf’s Ein Tag im Jahr: 2001-2011. In 1960, Wolf responded to a call by a Russian journal for writers across the world to describe in detail the same day, 27th September, following a practice which Maxim Gorki had begin in 1935; she then persisted with this custom for the next half century – the final entry in this volume is a facsimile of the handwritten pages written just over two months before her death, as she had not had energy or time to work them up for publication.

Wolf herself commented that she was not entirely sure why she persisted – that she recognised that not all the motives were conscious. Horror of forgetting, leading to the idea that at least one day every year should be recorded and not vanish into oblivion. An honouring of the mundane, not seeking out anything remarkable or momentous but simply noting what happened (though inevitably world events encroached; this volume begins with her waiting for the USA to launch its war against Afghanistan, with reflections on civilisation and empire that remind me why I really must, some day, write a book on Wolf and antiquity, unless someone else will hurry up and do it for me). What we would now call ‘mindfulness’, an attentiveness to reality and the real (I would speculate that ‘Wirklichkeit’ carries certain overtones of ‘authenticity’ as well as ‘reality’).

I always wanted to be the sort of writer who could devote part of their day to reflection on everyday life and world events, and recollection of and commentary upon literature and history (to be fair, Wolf is quite open about how much of her day is spent answering banal letters and dealing with mundane admin, including saying ‘no’ to a lot of stuff). At the same time, as I continue to drag myself out of the slough of Long COVID and feeling tired all the time, I feel as if a regular writing commitment might help build up my general writing stamina, and make it more of a habit. So, from next Tuesday, I’m going to start doing the same thing once a month, describing the day, for at least a year. Starting on Tuesday – which means, of course, that the actual piece will appear a day or so later – will mean that I take in the key date of September 27th.

Why, you might ask, once a month and not once a year (given that I certainly don’t have the time or energy or motivation for a conventional daily diary)? Well, it feels like the right balance of commitment and investment. An annual entry implies, for someone who isn’t already the sort of established writer who gets to ponder whatever they feel like and still get an appreciative audience, something substantial and indeed meaningful, so quite a commitment and a higher-risk enterprise, and at the same time doesn’t do anything to build up writing muscles. Once a month doesn’t set up the same expectation of length or profundity, while still being a regular enough discipline that I think I can actually manage it.

And at the very least, it will give me a monthly post for the blog, perhaps even more trivial than usual, but at least I can claim that its triviality is simply the reflection of the mundane existence of a middle-aged academic, rather than – as with all my other pointless blog posts – a product of my lack of inspiration…