On Keeping a Notebook

An essay on memory, habit, and the slow accumulation of days

There is a notebook on my desk right now. It is half-full, or half-empty depending on your disposition, and the handwriting inside it shifts mood by mood — cramped and hurried on bad days, looping and generous on good ones. I have been keeping notebooks since I was eleven years old, which means I have been keeping them badly for most of my life.

The question I am never quite sure how to answer is: what are they for? Not diaries, exactly. Not journals in the therapeutic sense. Something looser. A place to put things down before they dissolve.

Why We Write Things Down

Memory is less reliable than we believe. This is not a controversial claim among psychologists, but it remains genuinely surprising in practice. You remember the argument but not what started it. You remember the city but not the hotel. You remember that something made you laugh until your sides hurt, but not the joke itself — only the ghost of the laughing.

Writing things down is one answer to this problem. Not a complete answer, not even a very good one, but an answer. The notebook does not remember for you. It remembers alongside you. The two of you reconstruct the past together, each filling in what the other has lost.

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." — Joan Didion

This is the best description I have found for what a notebook actually does. It is not a record. It is a process. The act of writing the thing is what makes you understand the thing. The page is where thinking happens, not where it gets stored.

The problem with typing

There is a reasonable argument that typing is faster, neater, and more searchable than handwriting. All of this is true. There is also a reasonable argument that speed is the enemy of thought — that the slight friction of a pen on paper is not a bug but a feature, that slowing down is what forces you to decide what actually matters.

I don't have strong feelings about this. Some people think better with keyboards. Some people think better with their hands. The tool is not the point. The point is whether you are thinking at all.

What Goes In

People ask what I write in my notebooks, and the honest answer is: scraps. A sentence overheard on a bus. A word I didn't know before. An idea that arrived while I was washing dishes and would have vanished entirely if I hadn't had something to write on. The name of a book someone recommended three years ago that I still haven't read.

Also: bad drawings, phone numbers with no names attached, to-do lists that are historically interesting, the occasional complete thought, and more half-thoughts than I can count.

The ratio of usefulness

Of everything I write down, perhaps one in twenty things turns out to matter. One in fifty turns out to matter very much. This sounds like a terrible return on investment until you consider the alternative, which is losing all of it. (Also, you cannot know in advance which one it will be.)

The notebook is not efficient. Efficiency is not the point.

Returning to Old Notebooks

Reading an old notebook is a specific and slightly unsettling experience. The person who wrote it is you, clearly — the handwriting is yours, the preoccupations are recognizable — but they are also someone you no longer fully are. They were worried about things that resolved themselves. They were excited about things that came to nothing. They had no idea what was coming.

This is not melancholy, exactly. It is more like meeting a younger sibling you forgot you had. Fond. A little baffled. Glad they made it through.

The past is never where you think you left it.

What you find, mostly, is that your concerns have stayed roughly the same even as the particulars have changed. The names are different. The stakes feel different. The underlying questions — about work, about people, about whether you are doing any of this correctly — are very much the same questions they were a decade ago. This is either comforting or troubling. Probably both.

What to do with them

I have never thrown away a notebook. I have also never done anything useful with them. They sit in a box, or on a shelf, accumulating. Every few years I open one and read a few pages and feel something complicated and put it back.

Perhaps this is the right relationship to have with them. Not an archive, not a resource, just a record that the days happened — that you were present for them, that you noticed things, that you were, at least some of the time, paying attention.

On Starting

The hardest part of keeping a notebook is the first page. It looks too clean. The blankness is accusatory. Whatever you write will seem either too trivial or too portentous, and the knowledge that you will one day read it back makes you self-conscious in a way that is entirely counterproductive.

The solution I have settled on is to start in the middle. Open to page seven. Write something small and true and unimportant. Write the name of what you had for lunch, or the weather, or a sentence from something you read this morning. Establish that the notebook is a low-stakes place, a place where things can be ordinary, and the rest follows more naturally.

The notebook does not need to be worthy of you. That is precisely its value.

Written on a Tuesday, in a notebook, later typed up.