Always carrying a notebook

One of da Vinci’s notebooks. Source: The Leonardo Project

A good friend at university used to have a pen in their pocket all the time. We called it Wrighty’s Indie Pen, our sentiment a mixture of bemusement, disparagement and admiration.

Only in the last 18 months have I understood that Wrighty was on to something. In that time, I have carried an A6 notebook and pen in my pocket at all times and it has been fantastic. The notebooks have all sorts in them – thoughts, reminders, work, useful numbers, sketches, lists etc. – and I can’t now see a time when I wouldn’t have one in my pocket.

I mention this because of reading 9 things that happen when you carry a sketchbook with you nonstop. From there, it is a short hop to the positive difference carrying a notebook can make and the unanswerable question of which style notebook to use.

There is then the matter of how others have used their notebooks – here are 20 famous examples (I don’t know why they’re all men’s notebooks).

It’s a different experience entirely to making notes on your phone/tablet or carrying a more formal notebook of, say, A5 or A4 size. I commend the notebook to you.

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“Failure all the way down”

“Fail better,” Samuel Beckett commanded, a phrase that has been taken on by business executives as some kind of ersatz wisdom. They have missed the point completely. Beckett didn’t mean failure-on-the-way-to-delayed-success[.] To fail better, to fail gracefully and with composure, is so essential because there’s no such thing as success. It’s failure all the way down.

– Stephen Marche, writing in the New York Times

“Tense present” – DFW

This marvellous (and long) essay by David Foster Wallace is, in essence, about uses of the English (or American) language.

Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale? For instance, did you know that some modern dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative, and that certain conservative dictionaries were actually conceived and designed as corrective responses to the “corruption” and “permissiveness” of certain liberal dictionaries? That the oligarchic device of having a special “Distinguished Usage Panel … of outstanding professional speakers and writers” is an attempted compromise between the forces of egalitarianism and traditionalism in English, but that most linguistic liberals dismiss the Usage Panel as mere sham-populism? Did you know that U.S. lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?

In actual fact, though, and as the above passage demonstrates, it’s about any given topic or idea about which two groups hold their own interpretations and views.

 

 

Stoner, by John Williams

He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.

The line above, from around three-fifths of the way through Stoner, is the reason why I didn’t find it as compelling as everyone else seems to have done. Being nearly a decade younger than William Stoner at that point in his life, I perhaps feel more positive about life to date and what lies ahead. Similarly, the generation difference between him and us means I found troubling, if not true for the 1930s and 1940s, the elements of the novel relating to his marriage.

It’s perfectly understandable that all those who have raved about Stoner have been moved to done so: it is well written and does hold some universal truths. But each person quoted on the book itself is a man just after middle-age, so far as I can see. I was therefore unlikely to find it “the greatest novel [I’ve] never read” (as per the Sunday Times on the cover). Perhaps it’s the expectation of the novel that has done for me on this occasion. (I’d love to know what any women of any age make of it, too.)

As it happens, two of the people who particularly liked Stoner are people’s whose work I much preferred: Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Julian Barnes’s Nothing To Be Frightened Of.

The Silence of Sisyphus

John Gray’s writing is challenging. It makes difficult points about doctrines we as humans hold of humankind – our progress, our religion, our place in the universe – and does so in a straightforward way.

For example, in his latest book, The Silence of Animals, we have:

Allowing the majority of humankind to imagine they are flying fish even as they pass their lives under the waves, liberal civilization rests on a dream.

Gray’s main point in this and his other books is that we are bound by our nature to repeat mistakes of the past. What’s worse, we think we have the capacity to get better, to improve, to progress, when history shows we have no such capacity.

Human progress is no such thing.

His argument has developed a little since Straw Dogs, in recognising that some forms of progress have indeed happened – in science and technology, for example. But he notes that the knowledge we gain from the recurring dilemmas of ethics and politics is not cumulative in the way it is in science. Instead, we are not capable of learning from past experiences of previously attempted solutions.

Gray concludes that we will not be different in future from how we have always been. Further, he argues that to think of progress as leading towards a future, attainable goal is wrong:

History shows history to have no goal.

But in this there is the possibility of freedom – a freedom that comes from the world having, in fact, no meaning. Thus, if there is nothing it “opens to us the world that exists beyond ourselves”, and that we can be “liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made”.

This is a similar point to the one made by Albert Camus in the Myth of Sisyphus. He concludes we must find Sisyphus, a man “condemned to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight”, happy. Camus says:

Sisyphus’s passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing… I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.

Many find John Gray’s writing pessimistic. I find it redemptive, and recommend to you his work.