The difference between writing on loose paper and writing in a notebook is the relationship of the writer and the thing written. Unless you pledge to care for them, you may expect to outlive your loose papers. They will be lost, be thrown out, or wear out – age and die. But barring catastrophe, you may expect that your notebooks will outlive you. And a notebook has a kind of life, if only because it is hard to kill: the things which could destroy it – fire and flood – are the same as the things which could destroy you.
This is true even of cheap notebooks. Cheap paper is perishable; shouldn’t notebooks made of the same paper age at the same rate? But a closed book of whatever kind defies time. From my own slight library I have before me now, as I write, a book from 1944 containing a a pressed carnation as a messenger of the sunlight of 60 years ago; and a book from 1906 wherein is interleaved a sheet of cheap ruled paper (which has turned the brown of a paper grocery bag) with someone’s homework in Roman history. It is probably a decade or two less than a 100 years old; but it is safe to suppose that the man is long dead whom the boy became who wrote: “The Romans who were mostly peasants by working hard on their farms acquired the strength of will which made them the best soldiers of the world.” Perhaps his children are dead, and his grandchildren know little more of him than his name. But kept by covers, the cheap paper can still be unfolded and re-folded after a near-century of Louisiana summers.
To start a notebook, even while young, is to feel the reality of futurity and posterity. Decades on, your friends, your place, your name, the world may have changed; your frame and figure, your face, will have changed. What you will be, you would not now recognize. But you may still have, you may still read, you may still use that same notebook.
Or after a hundred years? Lost to accident and inconsideration; burned up or drowned; or moldering deep in some distant garbage dump, like a message in a bottle which never sees the shore? Or browsed by curious descendants of an unimagined generation, who would otherwise know you only as a few garbled stories, a fading or grotesquely discolored photograph, a few characteristic gestures and a bad joke on film? Or annexed to some unborn historian’s or anthropologist’s collection, as a lens through which that age to come, with its own preoccupations, may enter into sympathy with the past and gain perspective on itself? Or displayed in a museum, as a curious time capsule – or as the monument of a departed mind? Under the sky we know, or under a new sky in a city yet to be named?
We, dead, will not decide. But our notebooks are like the trees an old man plants – given, not to anyone, but for the sake of giving.
