The second Secretary-General of the United Nations kept a diary for thirty-six years and left it to be read after his death. Markings (Swedish Vägmärken, 1963; English 1964, in W. H. Auden’s translation with Leif Sjöberg) is that diary: a ledger in which the manager of the world’s crises recorded his other negotiation — with himself and with God.
The public career is nearly absent from its pages. Suez, the Congo, the General Assembly: he left all of it at the office, and what fills the book instead are aphorisms, fragments of poems, prayers without a church attached, and the pieces he called “dedications” — short addresses to unnamed friends that readers have puzzled over since. The entries begin in the mid-1920s, when he was barely twenty, and run to his last year. The Swedish title means waymarks: the small signs at the edge of a road that say only — someone passed here, in this direction, at this hour.
The genre this puts him in is small and grand. The confessional diary of a public man is rare enough; the confessional diary that survives its author’s position — that keeps its spiritual nerve through decades of office — is rarer. Pascal’s Pensées were notes toward an apology he never finished; Amiel’s Journal filled volume after volume with a sensibility that never acted. Hammarskjöld is the third case: a man who acted constantly, at the largest scale available to a civilian, and who kept the ledger of what the acting cost and whom it was owed to. Readers looking for gossip will find almost nothing. Readers looking for the price of a public conscience will find the receipts.
He gave the manuscript his own diplomatic frame. In a prefatory note, he described the contents as “a sort of White Book concerning my negotiations with myself — and with God.” A white book, in diplomatic usage, is a state’s published record of a negotiation. The joke has a blade in it: he is treating the self as a government with which he conducted formal, unremitting talks — agendas, concessions, deadlocks, the occasional treaty — and he is publishing the record once the government falls.
Because the government did fall. Dag Hammarskjöld was elected Secretary-General in 1953, to general surprise, and re-elected in 1957; the crises of Suez in 1956 and the Congo from 1960 made him the most visible diplomat on earth and, in certain capitals, the most resented. On the night of 17–18 September 1961 his DC-6, named Albertina, crashed on approach to Ndola in Northern Rhodesia — today Zambia — where he was flying to negotiate a ceasefire with the Katangese leader Moïse Tshombe. Everyone aboard died. That December he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. The first investigations could not fix a cause — the Rhodesian inquiry pointed toward pilot error, the United Nations’ own commission found the causes undetermined — and later UN reviews have kept the question open, treating an attack as plausible but unproven.
He was fifty-six.
The diary’s cast of mind is monastic. His private reading ran to the medieval mystics — Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing — and the entries carry that literature’s two great subjects: the discipline of attention, and the discipline of descent. Downward is the recurring direction: down in self-estimation, down toward the servant’s place, down from the summit where a Secretary-General is tempted to live. Power, in these pages, is a load to be carried low. The style is a civil servant’s — clipped, exact, allergic to gush — which is precisely what makes the mystical claims land; when a man writes like a memorandum and speaks of God, the God cannot be written off as weather.
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None of this was performance. Biographers describe a life that matched the ledger: an ascetic apartment, a scholar’s hours, physical exercise treated as hygiene rather than pleasure, and a habit of declining the perquisites of the office. The descent he wrote about was not a metaphor he visited on weekends. It was the budget under which he ran himself, and the diary is the audit.
Near the end, the negotiation closes with a settlement:
For all that has been — Thanks. For all that shall be — Yes!
Gratitude and consent: two words that fold thirty-six years of self-inquiry shut. It is one of the final entries, and it reads differently from a page of resolutions — it reads like a signature.
The English edition gave the book its second life. Auden — churchgoing, exacting, allergic to piety of the padded kind — worked from Sjöberg’s cribs, and his introduction treats the diary as a rare thing: an authentic spiritual document from a man whose public religion was silence. Published in 1964, it became a bestseller of the oddest kind, bought by statesmen and churchpeople for different sentences: the one sort underlining the discipline, the other the God. Both were right. The book is the only document of its century in which a man at the top of world politics reports, in real time and in pencil, on the state of his own soul. Its last line has since entered the general stock — the Thanks and the Yes turn up in eulogies, on memorial stones, in the margins of other people’s prayer books, usually without his name attached, which is a fate he would have audited and approved.
A Secretary-General’s shortest communiqué: himself.
The last entries were made in 1961. In September of that year the Albertina turned toward Ndola in the dark, and the diary went to press without its author — a White Book whose final negotiation had closed, signed, months before the government fell.