I've written about my father a lot, too, and while I am not ashamed of his flaws, I did think it was my right to focus on the parts that rang most true to me. It was my job as a firstborn son to protect him in death as I had been unable to do in life.

I have not written all this to complain: I have simply written the truth. I do not intend by what I have written to compliment myself: I have simply set down exactly what happened. Since I have made it a point in this history to write the truth of every matter and to set down no more than the reality of every event, as a consequence I have reported every good and evil I have seen of father and brother and set down the actuality of every fault and virtue of relative and stranger. May the reader excuse me; may the listener take me not to task.

It is my duty to tell what happened so the world will not forget. . . That’s my way of making sure that the history is not forgotten.

He wrote down everything he saw and heard, and most of his thoghts, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. It could take him many hours to write in his diary a survey of one full day: everything was an experience, any noteworthy observation which some nameless person might make was a new vista, any insignificant piece of information was a new sunrise, any ordinary poem he read for the first time was the beginning of a new epoch like a flight around the globe; the world was multiform, magnificent and opulent, and he loved it.

Write what I tell you in your book of memory.

He began to write his thoughts and observations concerning the day's events [...] It helped him better understand everything he had seen and done over the course of the day.

To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance and actions, when the hour arrives in which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a journal: a journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole heart!

I tried to capture the recollection of that experience. As if to say, you have these war-like, traumatic experiences and you retell them and retell them and each time you add something that wasn’t there the first time. The truth effect of that is that it just becomes larger and larger because your memory details are at work. The question then becomes: how many of those little embellishments—how many of those little nuances—can you add up before they tell a larger truth about the time that you were living in? That’s really the effect of writing a book, I think…

Write what should not be forgotten.

All of us forget more than we remember, and therefore it hath been my constant Custom to note down and record whatever I thought of myself, or receiv'd from Men, or Books worth preserving. Among other things, I wrote out Apothegms, Maxims, Proverbs, acute Expressions, vulgar Sayings, &c. And having at length collected more than ever any Englishman has before me, I have ventur'd to send them forth, to try their Fortune among the People.

My intention is to write things that can convey a vision of the memory lost, of a way of living in the world.

Who would remember his forbears,
What deeds, what words, what life was theirs,
Must chronicles and annals read
And histories written for his need.

إن حياتي تتجسد حين أرويها وذاكرتي تثبت بالكتابة؛ وما لا أصوغه في كلمات وأدونه على الورق سيمحوه الزمن .

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself