Past and present in the personal diary: reading time
Autobiographical texts represent by definition real-life time. Nevertheless, retrospective autobiographies present bygone days at the time of writing, when personal diaries relate a close past or even record the immediate present. In the diary, present is a future past of which the diarist intends to read the transcription in an another time. The tracks of these second readings sprinkle diaries but do not exhaust the wait of a complete posthumous reading in which a reader will be the diarist double. It is thus important to protect the diary so that it survives his author, and any disappearance of the diary is perceived as a collapse of oneself.
