There is no magic notebook that makes the writing effortless, no perfect blank-paged pocket of potential into which, finally, the words will flow out of you in perfect cadence, each syllable an artifact of seamless and inarguable genius.
Alas.
A notebook is a tool, like the pen or pencil you use to write in it. Nothing more, but also nothing less. It is a tool for collecting things. Fallen leaves, unlucky numbers, the names of wildflowers. Ticket stubs, timelines, tea stains, fountain-pen sputters, scratched-out words, eraser crumbs. Overheard conversations, new ideas, remembered images, inspirations, small acts of something that is almost but not quite theft. If there is magic in a notebook at all it is the kind of magic Virginia Woolf wrote about in her diary on April 20, 1919:
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.
A fine wish. Still, one must fling in the odds and ends.
For many years I was somehow convinced that any notebook had to be somehow perfect from the start. I’d stare at them longingly, waiting for the moment when I would somehow just know I was ready to write in them, each line of each page already distilled and refined, immaculate self-contained pearls of beauty and truth that would make anyone stop and catch their breath or, hope beyond hopes, maybe wipe away a single perfect tear.
But nothing gets made that way. Not even an actual pearl, which as some wag once noted is the last word of an irritated oyster.
Eventually I would write in the notebooks. After a few dozen pages, though, I would be unable to bear it any more. Returning to what I’d written, I invariably found it nothing like my fantasies. It was stupid. It was mundane. Most of all, it was embarrassing. I took a razor blade and sliced the pages out, telling myself that I could treat the notebook like a moldy apple and just cut the bad parts out.
It had not yet dawned on me that writing about the world — and about one’s self — is necessarily and by definition writing about the mundane, the mundus of love and Latin and lunchtime, awkward hopes and chlorine smell in your skin after swimming at the pool and so, so many broken things. Molds, hearts, coffee cups, records.
Whether one finds this embarrassing is, to be honest, a choice, a matter of approach. It took me a while to recognize this.
In the interim, I threw away notebooks. Cutting out the pages was never enough, no matter what I told myself. The gaps in the pages were like the site of a lost tooth, impossible not to continually notice, revisit, scour, probe. I thought I could save the book by cutting out the pages I’d muddied and tainted with my shoddy deformed words. There were more pages. I could try again. But slicing the written pages away couldn’t do anything about the fact that a red-hot ember of self-loathing had already scorched all the other pages. You can’t write on ash.
By and by I became capable of understanding that one no more ruins a notebook by writing mundane things in it than one ruins a bowl of soup by eating it. A notebook needs notes. The self-loathing is optional.
I keep numerous robustly mundane notebooks now. Only one is a diary, and none are journals. This has nothing to do with much except my dislike of the term “journal,” which has, like a few other hapless words (“manifest,” “journey”) become too deeply tainted by association with various forms of magical thinking for me to be comfortable using it to describe a thing I use every day. Mostly I just refer to them as notebooks or books, as in “let me get my book,” a phrase that leaves my mouth many times a day. None of them is precious but each is special, because all have jobs.
The present array includes four books that I use daily, often many times daily, and two that are occasional players. The little spiral notebook in front doesn’t quite count as a notebook. It’s more of a scratch-pad for daily life, the place where I keep running grocery lists and to-do items. Another spiral-bound number not pictured here is a scratchpad for day job business, and similarly not really a notebook in my eyes.
Far to the left, in a zippered green leather binder, is the Hobonichi Techo I use as a datebook. For convenience I also use a Google calendar, because so many people rely on electronic calendars so it makes doing the necessary business of setting up appointments a bit easier. I reconcile the two at least weekly, sometimes more often, and consider the handwritten one to be the authoritative version, not the will-o-the-wisp electronic version.
Far to the right is my current diary, which has a particularly glorious open binding decoratively stitched by Citrus Book Bindery. It has nice thick paper that never bleeds even when I write with my juiciest pen. The red leather binder holds a Leuchtturm 1918 dot-grid book, this one with a lavender cover, that gets the unsanitary job of holding all the drippings and scraps that pertain to online writing including this Substack. The small cream-colored book with the William Morris design washi tape along its cover that perches on top of the stack is full of notes on something that I suppose is best characterized as a Secret Project, since I’m collecting notes for it but that’s all I’m willing to say. The slim long book with the star charts is where I try to catch notes and contact info and needs and deadlines and other information regarding the volunteering I do. The black sketchbook with the rainbow unicorn duct tape stripe, which I put there to tell me which side is the front, holds sewing and knitting notes including an extensive trivium of measurements and alterations, pattern errata, and materials I’ve used for various projects.
I often marvel that I can keep so many notebooks. At one stage in my life I wouldn’t have dared keep even one because it was not something that could have been kept: I had parents who would not have hesitated either to read them or exploit what they read. At another moment I could barely stand to let the sordid ink dry before the razor blade cleared it away. For many years, if I had the urge to write, I would write only letters. I knew how to be entertaining, and sending the words off in an envelope meant never having to see them again. Writing for myself and keeping it seemed indefensible from every direction. For years, whenever I felt tempted to so much as purchase a notebook, I instead recited John Keats’ epitaph: “here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
It never took. I am an ink-drinker. I fill books and they sit on a shelf, occasionally consulted, mostly not. I cannot decide whether to include, in my will, a codicil that they be burnt when I am dead. I am too much of an historian to believe this would be an unqualified good but I am also not enough of a narcissist to believe it would be an unqualified good either.
The contents of the books are no less mundane than they ever were but the pages remain intact. Things get flung in, sometimes with purpose, sometimes for lack of a better place to put them, which honesty insists I point out is a purpose all its own. The tool is allowed to do its work. The notebooks fill little by little and strikethrough by correction, half-remembered conversation by bulleted list, in selfindulgent hedgehogs of punctuation and fragmented sentences and long rambling statements that do not end gracefully where the page does or obediently follow it as it turns but insist on scurrying up the margin like a spider up a wall.
“Let me get my book,” I say. The books get me back, line by mundane, slow, lopsided line.
This is so beautiful. And heartening!