Keeping a Notebook

I just finished rereading Joan Didion’s essay "Keeping a Notebook," which appears in her 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. "Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether," she writes. "Lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss." Perhaps this is true. My 94 year old mother has kept journals off and on throughout her lifetime, and has been writing daily entries in one for the past 20 years at least. I have learned my journal etiquette and religiosity from her.  
 
"Why do I keep a notebook at all?" Didion continues. "The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in a way that any compulsion tries to justify itself."
 
Reading Didion I am reminded of why I keep notebooks of my own . . . many of them. They are an archive of thoughts and recollections, containing everyday rumblings evidencing no particular intent. There are ideas for things I want to write eventually; memorable quotes and citations resulting from my reading and researches; lists of things to do and see; letters to write and why. "Keep a notebook," Jack London tells us in "Getting Into Print" (Editor, March 1903). "Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up in your brain." More importantly he tells us why. "Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory." This is especially true as we grow older and more forgetful. Such is my own case. "Why did I write it down" Ms. Didion asks? "In order to remember, of course, but what was it I wanted to remember." That is always a good question and one I ask myself as I page through one or another of my notebooks dating back a few years.

I always have a notebook of one sort or another with me. You will find me writing in it while commuting, or having a meal or a drink by myself. Whenever I have a few spare moments with nothing else to do. Ms. Didion likes to recall a memorable culinary event or an engaging dinner partner; a particular meal or a newly discovered libation. Even a recipe for a meal yet untried. I have done this more often than one can imagine. There have been times when I have been asked if I was a food critic. Perhaps I should have played along and scored some "comped" meals and drinks? 
And how many notebooks do I have you ask? At last count they number around 150 volumes dating back to 1969 and at present I am adding 2-5 volumes annually. Each volume can contain anywhere from 75 to 150 pages. And I write very small to boot so you do the math. And this number does not include numerous logs and notebooks full of research notes for one project or another compiled over a 32 year career as a historian employed by the US Department of Justice (the old one with an honorable reputation, and not the current one seeming hell bent on circumventing justice rather than guaranteeing it . . . but I digress . . . that is a subject for another notebook). There are also the notebooks/journals containing research collected for my doctoral dissertation thirty plus years ago, as well as those full of research notes and draft sections of manuscripts for other projects on a wide variety of topics: Thomas Wolfe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Steinbeck, Bruce Springsteen, Frank Lloyd Wright, et al.. There are a few notebooks containing poetry written over four decades. And how can I forget the three massive ringed binders containing the hard copies of the almost 500 essays posted here at Looking Toward Portugal over the past eleven years. Add to all these the countless notes scribbled on scraps of paper, notepads, napkins, telephone call reminders and buck slips, and various other items in various folders that were meant to be transferred to one notebook or another but never were.
 
From time to time my wife will ask me what I plan to do with all of this detritus of a historian/writer/journalist for whom everything is worth saving for that time when it will become important and necessary. As Philip Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post reminded us, "Journalism is the first rough draft of history." I believe this to be true. So what will become of all of this largesse once I shed this mortal coil, this veil of tears? Like any historian or writer, I would like to think that these dozens of notebooks might serve as a crucible for new ideas and theories that others might to some small degree find useful, or at the very least entertaining. They do contain observations of historical and cultural events over several decades of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. So who really knows? I will nevertheless continue to jot and scribble regardless. It’s what I do.