I love Ian Brown's columns in the Globe, they resonate so perfectly. So many wonderful insights in such a brief sampling of text. Thoughts distilled:
Ian Brown: A new year. A new notebook
I once knew a wealthy Toronto socialite who liked to fly the
Concorde from New York to Paris between Christmas and the new year.
"Just under four hours is the perfect length of time to copy out a new
address book," she said one afternoon at the hairdresser's. She had her
hair done by the same stylist in the same way at the same time on the
same day every week.
I know this because I wrote it down. She was a well-organized woman, tightly wound.
I thought of her the other day, as I do every January, when I buy a
new notebook for the new, outstretched year. I've used the same
notebooks for decades: 9 cm by 14 cm, small enough to fit in my inside
breast pocket, stiff cover, narrow lined, elastic loop closure, anchored
ribbon bookmark.
It's a neurotic habit, a personal notebook. It can work as a diary,
but it's not intended for publication. Anaïs Nin, who kept a diary from
the age of 11 to the day she died at 73 (it started as a letter to her
absent father), always planned to publish hers. So did Charles Ritchie,
the Canadian diplomat who gave us
The Siren Years. Virginia
Woolf, on the other hand, never intended anyone to see her notebooks,
hence their wandering and thoroughly private tone. She wrote them
quickly, after tea, with a dip nib pen.
A diary is an accounting. A notebook, by contrast, is to record
details that reach out as you pass, for reasons not immediately
apparent. A notebook is full of moments from days that have yet to
become something. "Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed
altogether," Joan Didion wrote in a famous essay about notebooks,
"lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents,
children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."
A notebook doesn't have to be a daily or lifelong habit. Woolf
started one before she turned 15, but didn't stick to the practice until
she was in her 30s. One of my favourite note-makers, critic Kenneth
Tynan (he wrote
Oh! Calcutta!), began in 1971, and kept it up
for the last nine years of his life. He used his notebooks to plan his
summer holidays, but also to detail how he was once robbed of $14,000 in
traveller's cheques from his wallet, whereupon he replaced them and was
robbed again. He copied down his best lines – "Lazy is the passive form
of selfish" – and his best theories (he was convinced P.G. Wodehouse's
novels were a success because Jeeves was a Freudian father figure, but
restricted to the job of a servant). There's a lot of gossip and even
more sex. In the summer of 1978, during an act of coitus, Tynan manages
to break his penis. He never really recovers.
John Cheever recorded not only his heterosexual affairs but his
homosexual ones, as well as vigorous romps with his wife. "Vodka for
breakfast. Mary mentions her mother for the third time in 35 years."
That's Cheever, defined in a single note.
You don't need to be a writer to keep a notebook. Director Steven
Soderbergh releases an annual list of everything he has watched, read or
listened to in the previous year. 2014's includes three viewings of
2001: A Space Odyssey.
My new notebook is fresh, and empty, and waiting; the old one is fat
and filled, handled and spent. The new book is hope, the old one
unavoidable. This morning I made a note in the newbie of the way the sun
rising from the southeast hits the pear tree outside my kitchen window:
The branches were both silhouetted and highlighted along their upper
edges, and I realized for the first time that this is how early morning
sunlight works. I do not expect this to be a useful piece of
information. I wrote it down anyway, just in case.
Just in case is the motto of the notebooker.
I like to read my previous year's notebooks over the winter
holidays, and from those fragments I gather a sense of the time that
poured by. It's never what I remembered or planned.
The year 2014 was full of conversations, often overheard. "Everyone
grows up in the same way, more or less. But no one's old age is the
same." (A woman in upstate New York.) "On prednisone, I'd be standing in
line at a deli, and see the salami and burst out crying. It was the
emotional Alps." (Overheard in a Manhattan deli. I spent a lot of time
on the road last year.) Evidence of procrastination (books recommended
and unread) alternates with pages of ephemera. One compares trifocal
prices. Others list words and definitions (
pilgarlic, a man
looked upon with humorous contempt or mock pity; apparently I imagined
that would come in handy). Dreams: trying to leave a hotel, caught in an
avalanche, losing the dog. (Nothing goes as well as it should.) A
recipe for lobster Florentine, with crispy leeks, from an excellent and
somewhat too attractive bartender at Edna, a restaurant in north
Halifax. I'd been alone for a couple of weeks by then and was afraid to
look directly at her.
Lists –
glasses, watch, phone, pen, notebook, hearing aids, wallet – compete with lists of nothing but questions:
What
did you feel at dinner with N? Happiness, boredom, jealousy? What did
it feel like to see the boats on the ocean, on the far horizon? On
the 9th of August I swim in the Atlantic Ocean for the first of 20 days
in a row, off a tricky, rocky shore with my brother. "Another blast of
life," my notes say. For me it's a high point of the year. As opposed to
In the elevator: sports jacket, gray flannels. sturdy shoes, checked shirt, out for dinner alone. Like being a statue. Oprah and Seinfeld turn 60. A single notation,
24/25, is a friend's father's score on a test for Alzheimer's, followed by his score a year later:
5.
In May, I note a "Japanese guy, doing math equations in Russell
Square." We're on holiday in London by then, on the way to picking up
our daughter in Edinburgh. Eventually we find our way to the North Sea
on the coast of Suffolk, to scatter my father's ashes. The ceremony is
light but respectful, and we make an afternoon of it. But two mornings
later I can't leave the beach, staring stupidly at whitecaps, thinking:
Is that him?
That patch of sea was my last glimpse of my father in physical form,
the way he mattered most to me. All of this, rendered in a single entry:
May 26/14 Thorpeness, GB.
By December, I was reading the collected poems of Philip Larkin (which my notebook says I bought in in Cambridge). One poem,
The Old Fools –
Larkin's dead-eyed take on old age – is copied out over four pages. I
see that I read it to my wife one night after Christmas as she fell
asleep, and that all she could say was: "Oh, oh, oh." This is how it
starts, and finishes:
What do they think has happened, the old fools,/ To make them
like this? Do they somehow suppose/ It's more grown up when your mouth
hangs open and drools,/ And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't
remember/ Who called this morning?... Can they never tell/ What is
dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?/ Not when the
strangers come? Never, throughout/ The whole hideous, inverted
childhood? Well,/ We shall find out.
We shall indeed. We spend most of our lives pointed forward, peering
into the future to see what's coming, planning how we'll respond. A
notebook looks the other way, and knows how all that ended.