The notebook

I’ve been looking over my old notebooks — the portable, pocket-sized pads that we tote along to press conferences or interviews. Over a decade of writing a column, I’ve filled scores of these little puppies. Most of them are full of scribbles about events no longer remotely memorable (except for the scribbles).

But we use notebooks for something much more important than taking notes. We collect our thoughts there, sometimes our sketches and doodles, our fleeting impressions, the sense transfers that occur in the living moment.

This activity is largely old-fashioned now, because people have the technology to springboard their immediate “impressions” — in the form of photos, either Instagrammed or not — out to an avid, or imagined, audience. A few words below the photo will pass for our thoughts on the subject. And then we move on.

But those notebooks don’t move on. They are sturdy little things, it turns out. And they often bear something closest to our secret history.

Leafing through one such book, I come across my flash thoughts on Madrid’s Plaza Del Toros (“Blinded horses: it doesn’t get much more brutal than that… The way each thrust by the matador results in a perfect, frozen, stylized pose…”); notes from an interview with Rafe Bartholemew, author of Pacific Rims; a trip to a tech fair in London; snatches of song lyrics; book reviews in progress; overheard phrases. It’s scattershot, yet somehow true to life. It has the gift of immediacy.

This is not to knock the Facebook diaries of our lives. Technology provides us a useful, vivid display of our “curated” lives online. My point is: so do notebooks. You flip through an old notebook, one loaded with quotes and names from, say, a Nokia trip to Barcelona, or a Sony trip to Japan, and you see, in the margins, a number of impressions of the trip you forgot you had. Something about strolling through Barcelona’s Park Guell with Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” playing on your iPod. Or a stolen visit to the John Lennon Museum north of Tokyo during a free morning away from the itinerary. Like Jesse and Celine in Before Sunset, you find that those stolen moments are even more precious because it’s time that “wasn’t supposed to happen.”

This ephemera is often lost in the digital age. We write our articles on our laptops, our desktops or iPads. But how often do we stop to digress about, say, the particular brittle quality of sunlight in Denmark? This type of observation may make it to conversation, or a blog entry, or a side note next to a photo on Facebook. But it’s not even Twitter-worthy, really.

Yet our personal, interior impressions of places and people and events are worthy. Perhaps we have to stop seeing such ephemera as worthy only if it might appeal to an audience — others who may see our post or our tweet. It’s worthy because, in the end, you had it. You experienced it. Putting it in a notebook validates that impression. It’s a record of your sensory and mental life.

Let’s look at the word “impression.” Webster’s defines it as 1) the act of impressing; 2) a mark, imprint, etc. made by physical pressure. (Third definition: a notion, feeling or recollection, especially a vague one.) It comes from the Latin imprimere, “to press.” Thus it’s a physical process, a bodily act of inscribing something onto a surface, such as a notebook page.

When we bother to write something down, even if we scribble over some passages or write in a god-awful lurching hand that only we can read, it takes effort; it has left an impression — on the page.

And as long as we hang on to those notebooks, the record still exists. We hardly ever transfer notebook contents to what we consider a more “permanent” digital platform; who wants to leaf through old notes and quotes? But doing so, you come across little things. Maybe useful things. Sometimes it’s an idea that occurred to you in an airport lounge, such as: “Why isn’t there a version of karaoke for dramatic readings? There’d be a stage, a spotlight, and a teleprompter or two where patrons could call up passages from Shakespeare, O’Neill, Albee, Tennessee Williams and recite them…”

Another benefit of the notebook: it’s serial. It may not make coherent, chronological sense, but it proceeds from page to page. Online media do not; there are submenus, links, things that draw you away from the journey. A notebook is a procedural, of sorts. The journey is laid out for you, before your eyes.

I like Moleskine notebooks, of course, of all shapes and varieties. But I find myself reluctant at first to sully their beauty with random thoughts. This is something you have to get over. Your most fleeting thoughts deserve life in a nicely bound notebook, not just jotted down in crummy paper spiral pads.

They say we’re all migrating to an unseen cloud, that one day our digital cache will be trusted entirely to invisible memory. No longer will we pollute our lives and gadgets with memory-sucking archives. I have a problem with memory that exists unseen, though: I prefer physical reminders of the things I’ve laid my hands on, set my brow to; I prefer the sketchy, ink-stained leaves of notebooks. Their ongoing imprecision reminds me of who I’m becoming, who I’ve been.