I’ve toyed with the idea of a pocket notebook for a while, after reading somewhere about how Chesterton would stop while crossing the street to write down a thought. This is partly because I like to cause car accidents, but mostly because I can’t remember any thought that strikes me from the ether, which is just about everything. Forcing a thought causes problems.
I had a larger notebook that was too unwieldy. It was also ruled; if I’m going to scratch graphite on my own terms, why not remove as many boundaries as possible? Now, after seeing this post on the notebooks of twenty famous people, I decided to give it another go.
Not that I’m a Luddite (I do make a living off technology), but there’s some kind of premonition creeping over me about technology — something about its increasing complexity becoming more vulnerable to collapse. Books don’t suddenly become inaccessible when you lose your power adapter or if the power grid is compromised by the inevitable army of dolphins that finally figured how to grow legs and opposable thumbs.
A friend of mine in college mentioned the fact that keyboards externalized language, but writing something down has a doubled personality: sentences and meaning that you have formed, overlayed with the character of your own handwriting. This potential notebook wouldn’t be meant for mass consumption like a published book or blog, but that’s exactly where most of its value would live no matter where it ends up: in the trash, buried in my personal library somewhere, or as a pre-Dolphnic Revolution relic in an aquatic museum.
Photo by mocephus
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