Looking back at the diary and looking at the bits and pieces recorded in my life, I feel like I am going backwards in time. A very strange feeling. You are the historian of your own life, recording your life in detail. The purpose of writing a diary at the beginning was to write down everything in my life and keep it. When I was in my seventies or eighties and could no longer walk, I took out all my diaries, sat in the sun, wearing reading glasses, flipping through the yellowed papers, and lamenting my past, the past that had disappeared.