The Diary of the Rose – Ursula K. LeGuin

BBC7 has this on iplayer this week to celebrate the author’s 80th birthday.
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Here is an excerpt from fictionwise:

Dr. Nades recommends that I keep a diary of my work. She says that if you keep it carefully, when you reread it you can remind yourself of observations you made, notice errors and learn from them, and observe progress in or deviations from positive thinking, and so keep correcting the course of your work by a feedback process.

I promise to write in this noteBook every night, and reread it at the end of each week.

I wish I had done it while I was an assistant, but it is even more important now that I have patients of my own.

As of yesterday I have six patients, a full load for a scopist, but four of them are the autistic children I have been working with all year for Dr. Nades’s study for the Nat’l Psych. Bureau (my notes on them are in the cli psy files). The other two are new admissions:

Ana Jest, 46, bakery packager, md., no children, diag. depression, referral from city police (suicide attempt).

Flores Sorde, 36, engineer, unmd., no diag., referral from TRTU (Psychopathic behavior–Violent).

Dr. Nades says it is important that I write things down each night just as they occurred to me at work: it is the spontaneity that is most informative in self-examination (just as in autopsychoscopy). She says it is better to write it, not dictate onto tape, and keep it quite private, so that I won’t be self-conscious. It is hard. I never wrote anything that was private before.

…

It is amazing how banal most people’s minds are. Of course the poor woman is in severe depression. Input in the Con dimension was foggy and incoherent, and the Uncon dimension was deeply open, but obscure. But the things that came out of the obscurity were so trivial! A pair of old shoes, and the word “geography”! And the shoes were dim, a mere schema of a pair-of-shoes, maybe a man’s maybe a woman’s, maybe dark blue maybe brown. Although definitely a visual type, she does not see anything clearly. Not many people do. It is depressing. When I was a student in first year I used to think how wonderful other people’s minds would be, how wonderful it was going to be to share in all the different worlds, the different colors of their passions and ideas. How naïve I was!

http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook920.htm

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I wonder how many of us keep hand-written journals??? Do you use a fountain pen?

Flores Sorde, the engineer turns out to not have a banal mind… but I will not post any spoilers.