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so many notebooks
Dec. 11th, 2019 11:02 amIt is a truth universally acknowledged, that if people know you are a writer, you will be gifted a million and a half blank notebooks. And if you are a writer like me, with an unhealthy love of stationery, you will buy another half-million yourself. I have a love of Japanese A4 notebooks, but I also scrounge random spiral notebooks and composition books from random places. It's a sickness, but it is one for which I will not seek a cure.
But what to do with all those gifted notebooks? Especially if they come from someone you care about and don't want to risk offending by regifting the notebook? I don't keep a regular journal -- I'm more than happy to blabber about feelings online. I do, however, love lists, and so I have begun to use my notebooks as commonplace books.
A commonplace book is a notebook in which a person writes down all the random shit they think is important -- quotations, lists of things (like books read or potential story titles), ideas to be fleshed out at a later date, etc, etc, etc. I actually started one in high school, although I didn't know it was called a commonplace book, and I wrote down profound quotes from whatever I read, as well as puns and bad pick up lines my friend Nicole and I came up with. I don't have that journal anymore. I threw away all my high school and college journals during a particularly rough time, and I don't regret it, even though it was an emotional decision. I had moved house five times in as many years and was tired of hauling shit around. I'll probably toss the majority of my journals the next time I move, but for now, I'm using a purple notebook with a fox as a quote and story title repository, a Thor Moleskine with notes about teaching, and a notebook with a black cat for this school year's meeting notes. Which are mostly random doodles.
I'll leave you with the most recent entry in my quotes notebook.
From when I first opened my eyes I've known that my place isn't where I am, but where I'm not and never have been. Somewhere there's an empty place, and that emptiness will be filled with me and I'll sit in that hole that will seemlessly teem with me, bubble with me until it turns into a fountain or a geyser. And then my emptiness, the emptiness of the me that I now am, will fill up with itself, full to the brim with being.
I'm in a hurry to be. I run behind myself, behind my place, behind my hole. Who has reserved this place for me? What is my fate's name? Who and what is that which moves me and who and what awaits my arrival to complete itself and complete me? I don't know. I'm in a hurry. Though I don't move from my chair, though I don't get out of bed. Though I turn and turn in my cage. Nailed by a name, a gesture, a tic, I move and remove. This house, these friends, these countries, these hands, this mouth, these letters that form this image that without warning has come unstuck from I don't know where and has hit me across the chest, these are not my place. Neither this nor that is my place.
--excerpt from Hurry by Octavio Paz
But what to do with all those gifted notebooks? Especially if they come from someone you care about and don't want to risk offending by regifting the notebook? I don't keep a regular journal -- I'm more than happy to blabber about feelings online. I do, however, love lists, and so I have begun to use my notebooks as commonplace books.
A commonplace book is a notebook in which a person writes down all the random shit they think is important -- quotations, lists of things (like books read or potential story titles), ideas to be fleshed out at a later date, etc, etc, etc. I actually started one in high school, although I didn't know it was called a commonplace book, and I wrote down profound quotes from whatever I read, as well as puns and bad pick up lines my friend Nicole and I came up with. I don't have that journal anymore. I threw away all my high school and college journals during a particularly rough time, and I don't regret it, even though it was an emotional decision. I had moved house five times in as many years and was tired of hauling shit around. I'll probably toss the majority of my journals the next time I move, but for now, I'm using a purple notebook with a fox as a quote and story title repository, a Thor Moleskine with notes about teaching, and a notebook with a black cat for this school year's meeting notes. Which are mostly random doodles.
I'll leave you with the most recent entry in my quotes notebook.
From when I first opened my eyes I've known that my place isn't where I am, but where I'm not and never have been. Somewhere there's an empty place, and that emptiness will be filled with me and I'll sit in that hole that will seemlessly teem with me, bubble with me until it turns into a fountain or a geyser. And then my emptiness, the emptiness of the me that I now am, will fill up with itself, full to the brim with being.
I'm in a hurry to be. I run behind myself, behind my place, behind my hole. Who has reserved this place for me? What is my fate's name? Who and what is that which moves me and who and what awaits my arrival to complete itself and complete me? I don't know. I'm in a hurry. Though I don't move from my chair, though I don't get out of bed. Though I turn and turn in my cage. Nailed by a name, a gesture, a tic, I move and remove. This house, these friends, these countries, these hands, this mouth, these letters that form this image that without warning has come unstuck from I don't know where and has hit me across the chest, these are not my place. Neither this nor that is my place.
--excerpt from Hurry by Octavio Paz
