The Lost Diary Found

A lost diary that is found years later is an intriguing and wonderful find. What if the lost diary you found isn’t yours? Do you have the right to read it? There are plenty of people who enter the diary with barely a second thought and then there are those who will allow the diary to call out to them with no avail. A lost diary that has been found, that doesn’t belong to you, and that hasn’t been read is like a ticking bomb of curiosity. You know you want to open it and gobble up whatever information might be waiting for you inside. Respect for someone’s privacy is the only reason that you haven’t opened the diary yet. How do you decide when it is acceptable to read a found diary?

In many cases it can depend on whose diary you have found, their relationship to you, and whether or not you have a chance of running into them with the discomfort of your new found information. In other words, if the person is still living and you know them you shouldn’t read the diary but return it to them instead. However, many people feel that if the person is gone or isn’t likely to ever be heard from again that it is okay to open the diary and read it. That’s interesting. We can’t respect the privacy of one and not the other, can we? But so many diaries that have been left behind have been published into fantastic works, and perhaps you are holding in your hands one of the greatest stories ever told. Reading someone else’s diary is an invasion of privacy. Reading someone else’s lost diary is also a mechanism for learning. I guess it is fair to say that whether you read the lost diary or not is a total judgment call. Judgment calls often imply that you might not love everything you discover.