2636.I have been additcted on various levels since high school of writing a diary. It must be said that right now that compulsion is tending toward a maximum, which is neither here nor there for anyone else but fairly joyous for me; also, there are levels of doing this. I'd like to be doing it a bit more; I tend to be distracted by shiny things and life events.
If one asked oneself who the most dedicated diarist is, what would they say? Pepys, I'd imagine. I think there's one who kicked it up to the next level, thought, and that'd be the legendary Buckminster Fuller, a man who never did anything by halves.
And so it is with his journal, or, as he coined it, his Dymaxion Chronofile. In it he pretty much saved everything - newspaper clippings, photos, pictures, correspondence, reciepts, business transaction records. Originally it was kept as a series of leather-bound scrapbooks, but eventually due to centrifugal pressures such as storage, economics, and suchlike was simply filed in boxes.
The purpose of it all was to create a study of a life in context. Knowing what happened during certain times and viewing what Bucky saved within the scope of them would, I'd presume, generate some insight as to how a human responded to his surroundings, how he changed them and how they changed him, for starters.
Today, we'd call them lifeloggers or, if it were me, hoarder. Whatever. There may be lifeloggers out there … but they are certainly no Buckminster Fuller, who was smarter than just about everyone I've ever known (no offense, everyone I've ever known).
Here's something about the Chronofile from the Stanford University collection: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/fuller/about.html, and this link will take you to a Google image search with the appropriate keywords. About four rows down is, for some bizarre reason, a photo of Sarah Palin. I don't know why either. Sometimes you just have to savor the irony.
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