"Growing old... what is the opposite of "growing"? I ask myself. "Withering" perhaps? It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. .... Growing old is certainly far easier for people like me who have no job from which to retire at a given age. I can't stop doing what I have always done, trying to sort out and shape experience. The journal is a good way to do this at a less intense level than by creating a work of art as highly organized as a poem, for instance, or the sustained effort a novel requires. I find it wonderful to have a receptacle into which to pour vivid momentary insights, and a way of ordering day-to-day experience (as opposed to Maslow's "peak experiences," which would require poetry). If there is an art to the keeping of a journal intended for publication yet at the same time a very personal record, it maybe what E. Bowen said: "One must regard oneself impersonally as an instrument." May Sarton, The House by the Sea, p. 27-28

I think her conclusion falls flat... but I really do agree that there is "an art to the keeping of a journal intended for publication" or otherwise. Perhaps she unwittingly invented blogging in 1974.