I JUST burned 40 years’ worth of diaries. I didn’t plan to — or rather, I had always planned to, once I knew I was dying, or so old that I would soon lack the energy to gather wood. But I woke one morning and knew it was time to let it all go.

I yanked open the flue, started a small log fire and began laying on the books. They burned slowly, at first, reluctant. A few pages caught, charred edges smoldered across my handwriting, plumes of thick smoke funneled lazily into the chimney. Small hard-covered volumes, bound with thread and taped up the side, most of them from an old French stationer, their plasticized glossy lapis blue or turquoise covers shrank and shriveled. I had thought that color would keep away the evil eye. The eye that would pry. The eye that would judge.

I didn’t want anyone else reading my diaries, ever.

Diaries are irresistible. And I am an unregenerate snoop. I will read any diary left in my path. I’ve even bent my path toward diaries carelessly left lying around. I know it is horrid of me, but I can’t help it. I’ve even read diaries in other people’s homes, that’s how bad I am (and that’s as close as I’ll come to confessing the most outrageous violation of privacy I ever committed, which turned out to be a life-altering experience — karmic return — and I promised myself I would never, ever do such a thing again).

Privacy was, perhaps, the proximate cause of my recent pyromania. My sons were spending the summer with me, probably the last one at my home. They were on the verge of departing into their own adulthoods, moving into their own first homes. It had struck me, several years earlier, that once children get to a certain age, the age at which they start keeping their own secrets, becoming opaque to those who love them most, the age at which they start doing things they cannot dream of their parents ever having done, they (the children, that is) become voraciously curious about what exactly their parents did do, what were their secrets, who were they, anyway? Once children get curious that way, nothing puts them off the scent.