Yi Sun-sin — Nanjung Ilgi, the war diary

Admiral Yi Sun-sin kept a diary through the Imjin War, from 1592 until two days before he was killed in action in 1598. It survives, it is a Korean National Treasure, and it was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2013.

You might expect a war diary to be all battle. Much of it is not. A great many entries are a handful of characters long: the weather, whether he was ill, who came to see him, whether he slept. He records his mother's death and his own grief in the same plain register as the rain. He wrote on the days when nothing happened and on the days when he could barely stand, and it is the unbroken run — not any single entry — that makes the record worth anything at all.

Today: write one line. Literally one. The weather and one fact. Clear. Did not sleep. An entry that short is not a failed diary entry — it is the thing that keeps a diary alive on the days you have nothing.