Every morning at Raines Elementary School in Jackson, Mississippi, all us black third graders were forced to stand and pledge allegiance to the stitched stars and bold bars of the American and Mississippi flags. 

In 2016, at age ninety, the Welsh historian and essayist Jan Morris began keeping a ­diary for the first time. She composed an entry a day ­(occasionally two) for 188 days, ruminating on ­history, current affairs, art, and literature alongside matters of old age, love, fellowship, and creature comforts. The following is a selection.

One morning, almost fifteen years ago, I woke up from a dream that was so vivid and powerful that I knew it must be true. I still remember both what happened in the dream and the feelings it left me with. 

Our house on Emerald Isle, The Sea Section, is divided down the middle, and has an E beside one front door and a W beside the other. The east side is ruled by Hugh, and the bedroom we share is on the top floor. It opens onto a deck that overlooks the ocean and is next to Amy’s room, which is the same size as ours but is shaped differently. 

It’s quite possible that the existence of these eight short stories, taken word for word from a collection of 148 diaries found in a dumpster in 2001, would come as a surprise to the diarist, Laura Francis.

Seen from a distance, a woman, etched against the darkness. Whether it is a woman, in fact, is hard to tell, we’re so far away. Framed by mountains of rubble, a tiny white figure.

I began the day standing at a threshold of time—the beginning of something, the end of something. I had a method for standing that was called art, then writing. The way I stood allowed me to see how things could begin and end this way—simultaneously.

In Bertolt Brecht’s diaries he writes about such things as the essence of art, which he describes as “­simplicity, grandeur, and sensitivity,” and its form, coolness.

Looking through the journals that I kept through the heart, so to speak, of my writing life, from 1962 on, I don’t find much of this sort of conclusion. 

In the winter of 1972, our entire family went to Rome with a client named Basil so my father could take care of a small legal task for him. Basil was a marijuana dealer, and my father was a criminal-defense attorney, but the legal matter was commercial and took only a few days. Then we drove around the country looking at artistic treasures, which my mother believed essential to our development.