Move over Samuel Pepys
Did you know that the record for the world’s longest diary is held by a Reverend Robert Shields of Dayton, Washington!
for at least 4 hours a day
for 24 years Shields recorded his every movement.
35 million words
Here is a link to a transcript of a radio interview Shields did with David Isay
Here are a couple of excerpts:
12:20 to 12:25: I stripped to my thermals. I always do that.
12:25 to 12:30: I discharged urine.
12:30 to 12:50: I ate leftover salmon — Alaska red salmon by Bumblebee, about seven ounces — drank ten ounces of orange juice while I read the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
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I don’t leave town. I haven’t left town since 1985, to visit my brother in Tennessee. I don’t like to be away overnight, because it gets me behind. If I travel to Walla Walla to do shopping, it puts me behind in the diary. I have to take notes all the time, and I get back and it takes me a day to catch up with the notes. So I avoid going out. I avoid being away.
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3:20 to 3:25 in the afternoon: I took the readings given in the margins. Humidity: fifty-one and a half. Porch temperature: fifty-six degrees. Porch floor temperature: fifty-one degrees. The study temperature: seventy-seven degrees. And the door temperature in the study, on the door jamb: seventy-four degrees.
The diary now resides at the Special Collections of the Washington State University library. It has lived in over 80 boxes since 1996 and has yet to be processed.
Thanks to the folks at the Kircher Society for this. It is language week over there and they are posting some interesting stuff.