I would venture a guess nearly all of us have started at least one diary in our lives.

If my own life is to be any sort of guide, it happens first in, perhaps, junior high when life seems to consist of turmoil and strife. Once purchased, the diary is opened eagerly and the blank pages are viewed with anticipation. The emptiness of a diary begs to be filled with meaningful observations of life and well-thought-out personal philosophies crafted out of our life experiences.

Yet, it seems that journals are quickly discarded, cast aside, abandoned to the relentless pace of life. I routinely find discarded journals, tucked into bedside drawers or buried under papers and bills.

There are people who have succeeded in documenting their lives and creating something more in the process. From Anne Frank’s two-year diary during her time in hiding to Charles Darwin’s diary he kept while aboard the HMS Beagle, there are examples of diaries which have entertained, educated and enlightened many people.

There is perhaps a point, however, when the desire to record one’s progress through life goes too far.

That point is the diary of Reverend Robert Shields. Estimated to be 37.5 million words in length, Shields’ diary records his life in five-minute increments beginning in 1972. Far from an epic of great thoughts and ponderings, the diary is filled with minutia of Shields’ life, from the contents of his mail to the ingredients and price of his groceries, and even his number of trips to the bathroom. Shields, who would sleep in two-hour increments so he could record his dreams, continued to write in his diary until a stroke in 1997. After his stroke he dictated to his wife, who reportedly quickly became bored with the exercise and refused to do it.

Shields is not the first to attempt the task of recording a section of his entire life. Buckminster Fuller complied what he called the Dymaxion Chronofile, which documented his life in 15-minute intervals from 1915 to 1983. Shields has acknowledged the similarity of his project to Fuller’s, and indeed both expressed the hope that their documentation would serve as the most complete account of a life possible so that future historians might learn from it.

The future, if not the purpose, of Shields’ unedited, spontaneous diary is ensured. He donated it to Washington State University, although faculty are not allowed to look at it for 50 years. While the purpose of the diary may seem trivial or even ostentatious, it in many ways is no different from many other societal traits. Humans are seemingly obsessed with recording their presence on this planet: from the numerous abandoned diaries in my house to the ever-present graffiti in bathroom stalls to the ongoing global race to build the tallest building. All of these attempts are variations on the theme of people attempting to validate their existence, shouting “Look at me!”

At their heart, diaries and journals are acts of defying mortality, a chance for posterity to know of us. Whether we are saying anything useful or valid is really secondary. And while it could be argued that perhaps Shields should have striven to leave a different, perhaps more useful, mark of his existence, in many ways this seems to be the most fitting.

By all accounts, Shields was an unremarkable man, save for his remarkable perseverance at recording his mediocrity. It seems to me that there is no more suitable, more quintessentially human action possible than for Shields to have hoped that his mundane existence would hold a pivotal truth of human nature.

And we are no different, with MySpace and Facebook cataloging the minute details of our lives, with blogs as repositories for every thought we might have. We are all building our monuments of absurdity, each convinced in our own way that our contribution is essential, important and pivotal to someone. Me? I just write columns.

– Quincy Miller is a senior in English from Altoona.