Diaries have always been a sort of personal gloss running along the margins of official history. Otto van Eck, pressed by his parents, recorded six years of a childhood on the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before his death at seventeen. It was a time when writing, keeping a diary, was part of the process through which men, women, and even children, became human and struggled to understand the world. There was something vital to be learned by looking into "this paper mirror."

There is something so exciting about reading a diary, feeling someone else?s commonplace reality snap into focus, I wish the documentary that introduces us to van Eck and the idea of children?s diaries from the Enlightenment was itself more vivid. This is a very personal reaction. The documentary is impecabily researched and produced, but it is delivered in such measured tones that it feels almost too scholarly, like one of Master van Eck?s dry childhood lessons. That said this piece would be at home in a weekend magazine format or during any discussion of writing and journal keeping.