On Keeping a Notebook

the impulse to write things down

The italicized sections of this essay are my favourite excerpts from Joan Didion’s ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, one of the best essays I’ve read in the last year. I tried to build off Didion’s work, put us in conversation.

I’m not sure if it worked. She is a much better writer than I am. But I tried.

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“Still Life with Books” (Jan Lievens, 1628)

I am constantly writing things down.

In the shed at my mom’s house, I have a cardboard box full of black Moleskine notebooks with peeling masking tape labels reading “FALL 2022” or “SUMMER 2019” in black Sharpie. Notebooks with morning pages, with budget plans, with designs to build shelves or treehouses. Notebooks with book lists, bad poems, summer projects mostly uncompleted, random thoughts that flash through my head, addresses of stone farmhouses I’ve seen, dialogue from a novel I’ll never write, dreams for the future, sad song lyrics, Shakespeare lines, street signs, milk slogans, snippets from conversations, sometimes overheard.

I write down cool or unusual words I come across, like eucatastrophe or belletristic or loamy. Iridescent or insipid. Succour or sundered or saccharine. Cupidity or clandestine or concupiscence or convivial or clairvoyance. Perfunctory. I like when a word sounds like what it means—“velvet” or “dulcet” or “mist”. Or sayings that used to be popular but have gone out of fashion, like calling a beautiful woman “handsome”. I write down phrases that catch my attention, like “a bizarre absence of cynicism” or “confessions dressed in metaphor” or “when you stumble across a mind that feels like walking into a cathedral”. I especially like when adverbs are used aggressively, almost improperly. “Breathtakingly insipid” or “ungovernably proud” or “ambiently bad” or “exceptionally avoidant” or “excruciatingly aware” or “stupidly happy” or “unbearably sad”. I also like when words you don’t normally see together are put together and it feels noticeably weird, almost clunky and awkward and forced, but in the best way possible. “Lacerating honesty.” Or, my personal favorite, because it breaks rhythm and verges on redundancy, calling something “false and bad”. I also write down simple phrases that stir something in my heart or make me smile. “The sort of coffee you marry someone for being able to make.” “Late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair”. “I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it”. And I write down sentences that hit my soul square in its solar plexus. “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”

When I’m walking or biking or running or in the shower or out of the shower, sentences pressure through the seams of me. Words mix together in my mind. (I usually make up one or two words every essay and, so far, no one has noticed.) I repeat sentences I’ve written over and over and over again, incessantly, abrasively, like water on rocks, until they sound smooth.

I have two separate pads of paper on my desk, one to write out ideas and one to draft essays. I carry a field notebook in my back pocket when I’m out and about. I almost never leave home without my leather pen case. (I also almost never leave home). I have a note on my phone called “fleeting notes” where I capture thoughts before they, well... fleet. I have a notebook to copy out scripture, a journal for prayers, and a different notebook for sermons at church. I fill the margins of any book I read with smudged pencil. I probably write a few thousand words a day.

Some of my notes are biographical in nature, details of my day, funny encounters or memorable conversations, some are open tasks and to-do’s, but most of my notes are abstract thoughts, psychological insights about myself or strange little observations about the world. We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

Recently, I’ve begun to wonder why. Why do I constantly take notes? Why do I spend so much time writing things down? Is it useful? Good?

The impulse to write things down is peculiar and hard to explain to someone who doesn’t share it. I don’t fully understand it myself. I am somehow a Dostoevsky character, acting and aware that I am acting, but not sure why I do certain things, why certain instincts lodge themselves in my heart.

Without a notebook, my experience feels raw and undigested. Unfinished, almost. My brain is a bit fuzzy, unsettled, like there is something that needs attention before it will leave me alone.

I think this impulse was probably hard-wired into my board at birth. My Mom still tells stories of how, at three years old, I’d constantly be making notes on little scraps of paper that I’d stuff in my pocket and carry around everywhere I went. Before I could write words or letters, it would be pictures and symbols. It’s got something to do with being sentimental, perhaps. I’ve always had a hard time saying goodbye to hotel rooms, even if it was kind of a crummy, damp room on the second floor off an interstate exit and it was only for one night. Every time I close the door to walk down the spongy, overly carpeted floor toward the elevator, I know it’s the last time I’ll set eyes on any of it again. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Many of my memories from childhood are embroidered by an eight and a half by eleven Hilroy notebook I kept in my overstuffed drawer in the dining room mantle, pages filled to the corners with little anecdotes and half-finished stories and deranged drawings. In grade four, I wrote a poem from the perspective of a man in the Twin Towers on September 11th, titled ‘Falling’. I have no idea what prompts a nine-year-old to write about a middle-aged man reflecting on his life while plummeting to his death as the ground gets closer, but it does reveal a seriousness and heaviness and preoccupation with mortality that has patterned parts of my adult life, a certain vein of intensity that has pushed me toward the extreme. The poem won a few awards.

I suppose the writing was on the wall, even then. My love for language, my obsession with trying to capture things, keep things, stick them in a big glass case where they won’t change. Long before I was conscious of it, there was this need to communicate all that is inside of me, this world going on in here, even if all I had were words. I also did write on the wall in my childhood home with an orange Crayola marker, although it was in a basement closet under the stairs used for storage with weird white double doors that never did quite close properly. (I was always reasonable, even in my recklessness).

I could say that I take notes because I write essays, but I think that would have the order reversed. I don’t take notes because I write; I write because I take notes. I write because this living mass of thoughts and feelings accrues inside of me, all strangely connected, all orbiting itself, that grows agitated left unexpressed. The barometric pressure becomes, in a word, unbearable.

If writing is a kind of embodied emptying, my notebook is evidence of all that fills me up. And if writing is what helps me process the world, determine what I think, taking notes is what teaches me how to pay attention and be conscious of what I pay attention to.

Everything in my notebook is a clue to who I am. After all, the things I write down must have some meaning to me, or I wouldn’t have bothered.

There’s that saying: how you see is who you are. How things land on me, what sticks out as meaningful and worth remembering, reveals how I see. But perhaps more importantly, it is a reminder that I am doing the seeing. That I am the absolute centre of everything I experience, where everything that happens is happening in my story, a story that begins with my birth and ends at my death, all for me and about me. Our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.”

My life is the most vivid and urgent and real thing I know.

This vast world is experienced entirely from my two floating eyes fixed inside my skull. I don’t see or hear all that might be seen or heard, but only what is helpful for me to see and hear. In other words, my perception is predetermined by my template of values, what I deem meaningful and worthy and good. And this perspective shapes my moral atmosphere. What’s good for Tommy is good; what’s bad for him is bad.

The tricky part is, I can default assume that everyone else has the same template of values as me, or should, because my values are the most correct and good and universal. Other people who hold different values are wrong and deluded and, if they could only see clearly, would clumsily come to see the total wrongness of their values and adopt mine. (If this sounds like mere hyperbole, think about the last argument you had).

As selfless as I aspire to be, my notebook is a reminder of my basic self-centredness, that I spend almost my entire day thinking about me and my desires and my problems and my fears and my confusion and how hard my life is. My notebook makes me excruciatingly aware of this narrating self, the guy who sees himself deeply and literally at the centre of being, who likes being the main character, thinks he is somehow separate from other people, different from everybody else, and calls into question whether that guy can be trusted, especially at 11pm on a Wednesday.

Without the continual and conscious effort to maintain this kind of awareness, to relax my default assumption that I am located at the exact centre of being, I will go through my average adult life on autopilot, thinking the world I’ve made with my thoughts is the real world, confident in my perception in only the way the truly blind can be—those oblivious of their blindness.

In a way, taking notes is a way of remaining receptive, a form of sensitivity. A means to stay awake.

“I sat there on a city corner,” the note reads, “outside a yellow-lit board game cafe, just tired enough for everything to seem sad and beautiful and slow moving and soft.” Why did I write this down? What was I doing on a city corner? Why is it written in the past tense? I sort of remember. It was late September. I was on my way home from Seattle and my connecting flight was changed at the last minute so I was in this small university town on the day of their homecoming football game, waiting for a bus home. It was early autumn and the evenings were dark again but still warm and windy and the ground was still soft and summer was dwindling, but alive. There was still time for things to change. At least that was how it felt to me. I had just finished university and missed my friends and how free those days felt. And I felt tired and lonely and kind of gross after a day of travel and there were these two girls in the window of the cafe playing some board game, animated and laughing and happy, a rectangle of soft yellow light spilling out to the sidewalk, and I saw my dark silhouette in that warm light and the contrast made me feel all the more deeply, but not in a mean, ugly, grasping way but something gentle and patient. Spacious. Something like wistfulness. Perhaps it was raining that night at the bus stop. I can’t remember. But it might as well have rained, could have rained, did rain. I’m not sure it matters, for our purposes.

Sometimes notes that once were vivid and important now feel flat, sort of petty and cliché. “One thing I’ve learned from periods of solitude, edging on sensory deprivation, is that the brain is a wild, mysterious place.” I wrote this down after coming out of a seven-day silent meditation retreat in Thailand, after having all these old, strange memories from childhood bubble up in my intense boredom, things I didn’t know that I still had stored somewhere. But when I reread that note now, it doesn’t mean much. It feels like a relic from a past self who was very spiritual but also very lost.

Perhaps it’s good to realize how malleable I am, how much potential there is within me to change. It is easy to forget all the people I have been.

I look back on notes from half a decade ago, alarmed by the texture of my thoughts. Most notes are about interview prep and militant morning routines and future plans with a girl I loved, until I didn’t. I remember how lost I felt back then. How I thought I’d never find solid ground.

It is painful and hard to keep in touch with parts of my past, with a couple of people I used to be. To confront the nineteen-year-old who smoked and drank and breathed lies and wanted to work on Wall Street even if it meant leaving everything else behind, caught up in a vortex of anxiety and ambition, looking driven when he was really just afraid. It is also hard to remember that parts of him are still inside of me today.

I wince when I think of that fall when I worked on the 51st floor of the Scotiabank tower at that hedge fund everyone wanted to work at, when I never exercised or ate, when I would sweat through my sheets, when I was on a first-name basis with the cleaning lady who would roll through at 10:30pm. Or that summer I spent unconsciously trying to get my girlfriend to break up with me because I decided I was done but lacked the strength or resolve to cut things off, dragged on by inertia and calling it fate. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

There are also parts of my past I like to revisit, spots where I was once happy.

“This summer has been one of those rare times when you know how good you have it while it’s happening, but it still passes away just the same.” I remember when I wrote this. My final few days in Newfoundland, where I spent the whole summer living off-grid, a stone’s throw from the Atlantic. The steaming July mornings, making coffee on a rickety red Coleman stove and watching the sun rise. The long days under open skies, cutting down pine trees with a chainsaw I was grossly unqualified to use, fishing for cod in a tin boat we launched off the beach, trying to be kind to this girl visiting from Germany who had been hurt badly by life. The quiet evenings reading Thomas Merton’s journals, playing auction after clearing the table, finding the way back to my tent by the light of the moon. I remember feeling like a kid on summer break, avenging all the summers I spent obsessing over interview prep and spreadsheets in overly air-conditioned offices under artificial light. I remember thinking I could live like this, being outside all day, even without running water or electricity. I remember not wanting summer to end. I can still hear the sound of rain on the canvas tent, lying in my cot, gazing up into the darkness, not wanting to forget how good and important this felt, aching to create a home like this somehow. It all comes back.

I want to be reminded that my past is real, that it happened and I’m not crazy. Because my life, when I look back on it, feels like a fiction, a sort of strange dream, something lived by somebody else. It feels like a story of a familiar stranger, a story I was told one night when I was tired and groggy, a story I sort of remember but only dimly. I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present. It’s hazy and far away, almost inaccessible. Even though I alone hold all these memories and nobody else.

It feels important to remember that night in June, the last week of high school, walking down to the beach at midnight with my two best friends and a backpack full of cheap Mexican beer, listening to Thomas Rhett sing about how life changes. Or all the evenings in university playing euchre with my roommates in our basement apartment during lockdown, sitting around a wobbly wooden crafts table splattered with paint, arguing with the air of casual indifference that only close friends can. Or that summer at Balsam Lake, reading Tolkien every morning on the deck, sun rising over the cedars and glinting off the water, burning off the mist; the long runs on dirt roads past farmers’ fields; the bike rides through green tunnels that stretched straight as far as the eye can see. I want to remember the fireflies in late August, the long grass and croaking toads, the feeling of having everything I said I wanted but still being empty, a little homesick even though I was always at home. Leaving the warm glow of the fire and walking out to lie down on the dock to stare up at the stars, overwhelmed by how many there were, like some giant hand had stuck little pinholes of pure white light in a raw black dome, how I couldn’t number them, and if I focused my eyes on a small area, even more would appear. Most of all, I want to remember how small and calm I felt in those moments.

A notebook is a means to blow away the dust that settles on my past and keep the page open to who I was, to the people I have been, and, in some ways, to who I am now. We are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves. No one can remember who you were but you.

I can be quick to think that where I am now is new or unique. It’s easy to forget the intensity of my past, to apply a retrospective romance as if it was always obvious things would turn out okay, that I would be fine. Hindsight isn’t always twenty-twenty.

When I read old notes, I’m surprised how much I circle myself, repeat myself, struggle with the same things over the years, yet somehow maintain the illusion of novelty. My thoughts seem strangely recursive, almost futile.

The past few months, I’ve been moving through a period of discernment, with its accompanying groundlessness. Where the ground is shifting beneath my feet, where I can sense change coming the way a deer senses a storm. Although I’m completely not sure what that is, something familiar is changing. I told my Mom over dinner that sometimes I feel afraid. Those are the words that come through. Funny enough, flipping back through an old notebook from two years ago, I came across a poem I wrote when my life was going through another big period of change. “I am very afraid” the first line reads. “These are the words I keep repeating / I keep hearing in my ears / Murmured up through my heart / And my twisting knotted stomach.” It’s helpful to know I’ve been in a certain place before, if not identical at least somewhere that rhymes, and I made it out. Maybe not unscathed, maybe not even unscarred, but I made it out.

Sometimes my life feels so surreal it doesn’t feel like mine, as if at some point I stopped living my life and started living something else. Sometimes my mind feels like an unsafe place. It’s comforting to remember how the fog cleared, how I found stable ground, how it was precisely that period of painful unknowing that led me there. I have learned the light always returns. The words I’ve written remind me when I forget, when the darkness makes me think there’s never been anything but. My notebook is living proof.

Despite its comforts, there is also something haunting about memory, some sense of aloneness that sets in like frostbite in the soul. That I alone hold these memories, that no two people remember anything the same. Time passes, time marches, time continues ticking, not slowing down, not waiting for anyone. I will only get older and older, and days will pile up like sheets of paper, crinkle and flatten into each other, press together like the pages of an old book and get tucked away on some top forgotten shelf, covered by a thick layer of dust. I will inconsolably remember more until one day memories are all I have, the walls with which I fortify myself against the attack of time. There will come a moment when there is nothing left to wait for.

There is no hatred in this sense of aloneness, only a sadness at my inability to express it.

On a walk the other night through Mount Hope, a friend asked me if I’m ever worried I’ll run out of ideas to write about. “Not really,” I said. “I’m more worried by how many ideas and feelings I’ll never be able to capture or explain in words. How much I’ll never be able to write about, that will just go unsaid. And even if I spent a thousand hours trying, dedicated my entire existence to it, there is so much inside of me that can never be communicated to others and will remain within me until I die. All the black Moleskines in my mom’s shed will grow mold and all those little scraps of paper I’d once stuffed in my pockets will be dust, lint, as if they never existed at all.” I said something like that, I think.

The cruel irony is that even if I tried to write everything down, preserve everything observed, record every idea or strange sensation that flashes through me, it would all be forgotten eventually.

So why do I keep a notebook? What is the impulse to write things down?

The naive, almost childlike answer: not to forget. But in a deeper and truer and more enduring sense, I keep a notebook as proof of my existence. To others, but mostly to myself. That I lived. That I was here. Not for after I am dead, but for when I am alive.

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

Write you again soon,

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