They look at me strangely when I open the notepad. I understand. They have faces covered with single posts, the faces of strangers from newspapers, heaped advertising slogans without product. That’s all that stands out, the notes are unreadable due to poor handwriting. This is not a diary, this is a notepad, useful only to its owner. It does not contain daily entries, it does not seem trivial to me to register the trivial, it is always useful, instructive or even funny for the future. I find the diary to be good for mental health because, as a safety valve, it creates a cool detachment during difficult times. For those who have the consistency or dedication to keep a diary.

My notebook works cartographically. To immobilize everything that grabs my attention by placing it in the center of my field of vision at the moment. Either for assimilation, or to save small current affairs from obscurity or oblivion. Sometimes (often) I feel that current events are moving too fast for me. If I can’t get time back, I actively save something from it so it doesn’t get completely destroyed.

I was browsing it yesterday and noticed two marked annotated news that look the same. One involved a six-year-old girl, Eliya Fedorenko, who died of mental trauma. They said a heart attack. She lived in the basement of a house with her grandparents in Ukraine. She did not leave the shelter since the beginning of the war, hid there, away from her parents, died in her sleep, fear, they say, paralyzed her.

A picture of a beautiful six-year-old girl and three hundred words dedicated to a child who died of fear. We don’t know anything more about her. “Who is this girl?”, I wrote above. In the earthquake in Turkey, the same entry is repeated next to a photograph of a rock lying on a pile of rubble, as an impromptu monument that reads: “Here lies a girl in a green sweater.” That’s all we know about the girl who accidentally died wearing a green sweater. We won’t know anything more about her, maybe someone knows her story, we don’t even know her name.

The retrospective of the Dutchman Johannes Vermeer, which is currently taking place at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, is a huge success and is always sold out. Regarding the exhibition, which I probably will not attend, I noted that Vermeer is a great still life painter. He left eleven children and debts, but nothing is known about his identity. No trace, no note, no recorded speech, no correspondence, no diary. We don’t know what it looks like. It is not even clear where he is buried, somewhere outside of Delft.

Most of the paintings depict women absorbed in their silent pursuits or fun. Most of the projects take place behind closed doors. In an isolated environment where doors are closed and secrets are well kept. Only a window, usually on the left side of the canvas, makes one suspect that there may be a world, life. But nothing interferes and no one can disturb the figures that look familiar, but at the same time leave so much room for the imagination. In reality – the canvas – while nothing soberly happens, surprise is created by anticipation of the development of events. This is the expectation of light charm.

A diary is good for mental health, like a safety valve creates composure in difficult times.

The map can be seen in several of his paintings, such as Woman Reading a Letter. In the center, a young woman in a blue dress is absorbed in reading a letter, and in the background, just behind her head, is a map (based on a real map from 1620). Our attention is directed to her face and map. In the inner world and in the outer world. In her thoughts and reality. The map guides and must be accurate. It’s real because it’s realistic. Regular revisions make it valid.

The same is true with syllogisms. They are displayed as information. New thoughts come on and return to old ones. An imaginary new map leads us—without getting lost—to the next step. Now that I think about it, only a diary, written with due honesty, could securely record the course of our reasoning. Reminding us of where we were months or even years ago, reminding us of the path of our different selves.

But who are these women, for whom the rest of the world does not stand up, it seems that they almost do not exist? Unknown women that the artist has extracted to weave into an elaborate narrative, giving them eternal life.

Time stops in thirty-five paintings by Vermeer. Perhaps that is why the public wants to see the exhibition. An artist who restores balance, as a counterbalance in an age of kinetic overexcitation, when important things are lost when they are silent. In his painted moments of rest, nothing happens and everything is possible. A tribute to the meaning and poetry of life, everyday life and people telling a short and deafeningly quiet story, like a girl who died of fear, like a girl in a green sweater.

Mrs Eleanna Wlastow is a writer based in London.