I concur. But on a purely selfish level I recognize some works I’ve greatly enjoyed wouldn’t exist if the people who inherited them had honored the wishes of the deceased authors. As a practical matter, I recognize this is foreseeably pretty unlikely to change given human nature.
I got that. It does occur to me though that my wife has the password to my personal laptop. If she so chose to delete the relevant folder in the event of my untimely demise, it wouldn’t bother me since, as I said, it’s private and she’s the only person I care to have access to it.
“All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together,” wrote Anne. “In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there. Uncle Walter is not normal. Girls sell this.”
I guess that could be understood that Anne’s father visited brothels (in Paris). Also (as mentioned in the article) that her uncle was gay. I don’t think it’s that far fetched that her father wanted to hide these remarks.
An elderly Jewish man goes to a confession booth in a Catholic church. He begins to tell the priest about this young woman --young, stacked, blonde-- he has had sex with. The priest stops him. “Sir, you’re not a Catholic. You don’t have to tell me this!”
“I’m telling EVERYBODY,” the old man says.
A hunter is hunting in the forest, when a bear grabs him & fucks him in the ass. Enraged, the hunter gets an elephant gun & returns to the forest. Again, the bear grabs him & fucks him in the ass. The hunter gets a machine gun & returns to the forest. The bear knocks him down & fucks him in the ass. The hunter gets a cannon & goes after the bear. The bear grabs him & before he fucks the hunter in the ass again, says “You know, I’m beginning to think this isn’t about hunting!”
On prostitution, she wrote: “All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together. In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there.”
Haha, I had better be preapred the next time a woman on the street accosts me and demands sex. That’s what I’m taking away from this.
Even worse in this case, because she wasn’t a public figure, an author or political figure or actress. She was just a little girl who had gone out of her way to make something private. I find this voyeurism creepy, and the attempts to justify it on the basis of “because history” are just self-serving twaddle.
Wordsworth was also (albeit a brilliant visionary poet) an arch conservative writing in an area where the upper classes were very particular about their privacy. Personally, I’d also be interested in Horace’s diaries. Even if he said you should never publish poetry less than nine years after writing it.
Virgil was also going to have the Aeneid burned after his death, but Augustus defied him on that one, and a good thing too.
Lord Byron, on the other hand, did manage to have his diaries burnt posthumously, to the doubtless chagrin of many biographers, but no doubt also to the intense relief of many of his contemporaries. And that might have been a good thing too, for all I know.
