Somewhere in our storage unit, there is a stack of two dozen bound notebooks. These notebooks were designed for permanence, with numbered pages ready to betray any tear-outs, no matter how neatly done. Are the notebooks blue and grey, or blue and blue? I don’t remember. I must dig them out on my next visit, because, I now realize, I can no longer put off the horror of reading the twaddle with which I filled them, forty-odd years ago. I began keeping these notebooks in college, and continued writing in them for several years afterward. Whatever the contents, the notebooks themselves are documentary evidence of a period of my life. There can’t be much worth reading, but it would be clarifying to know when I began, and when I ended. There’s a bitterness about the notebooks now that I couldn’t have imagined then: if I were forty years younger, I would never resort to the medium of a notebook. I should go straight to blogging.

My writing and my thinking would have been better for it. The fact that anyone with a link can read what I’m writing here keeps me sharp, even if no one does. My notebooks were not only unpublished but unventilated. Since I never re-read them, I repeated myself, lost in self-absorption. I wrote in them because I thought that doing so would lift me out of the sad futility of my life. But I never felt the futility of my life more acutely than when I was writing in the notebooks, because I had nothing to write about. When I did have something to write about, I wrote a letter to a friend. Or I wrote a spontaneous paragraph or two about a piece of music for the radio station’s program guide, inserting it right in the listings. I wrote two rigorous essays, for reasons that I do not care to discuss, about (a) Beethoven’s late quartets as reflected in Eliot’s Four Quartets, with passages of music alongside passages of verse — cool, huh? — and (b) the vision of the earthly paradise at the end of the Purgatorio.

I was able to write about music and literature because I was reading a great deal about them, more than as an undergraduate, and I saw how writing about them was done. There were no such templates for writing about myself. The only thing that I grasped about myself was that I was different, in defective, non-special ways. Even my strengths were bent. The proof of my worthlessness was that I had wound up in Houston. If I’d had any sense, I’d have turned my back on myself as a subject and got on with the life less troubled — sooner than I did. But I had been taught that the unexamined life was not worth living; and how was I ever going to be like Virginia Woolf if I did not keep notebooks? For my notebooks, unlike the pieces on music and literature, were aspirational in nature: I wanted to become the sort of person who keeps a notebook. I have yet to become it. When I write notes now, it is to remember thoughts and passages that I’ll want to write about here, when and if I get round to them. Genuine secrets I never commit to writing: quite aside from the imprudence of doing so, the true test of a secret is whether it’s worth remembering. Most, in my experience, are not. Most of mine have dissolved in oblivion.

Reading the notebooks and diaries of writers and other accomplished people was of little help. I rarely agreed with them about anything. And I already knew that I preferred the uneventful life — although I was ashamed of this and regarded it as a weakness. Turbulence shuts down the part of my mind that I find the most congenial to exercise. On a good day, nothing unexpected happens, and the expected happens as expected. (Kathleen’s raisin toast is always browned to perfection after exactly two minutes in the toaster — unless the toaster is already hot because I made myself an English muffin first, so I don’t.) The surprises are all quiet and interior. They jump out of books, or off of video screens. I hear something new in a familiar piece of music.

I can’t really say how I felt, back in the Seventies, about writing about people I knew. I’ll have to go over the notebooks before I determine that it made me uncomfortable, because (as I now believe) writing about other people becomes interesting insofar as it is heartless. To size someone up dispassionately may be useful for hiring purposes, but in humane letters it is a kind of murder. Because you can’t murder the dead, it’s probably best to wait.

I’m afraid that, when I open the notebooks, I am going to be knocked down by the stale breath of my immature vacuity.

***

Here’s a little surprise from this morning: I’m reading, as I think I mentioned, Alexander Stille’s The Future of the Past, a collection of reports about various conservation and ecological projects that was published in 2002. It’s impossible not to wonder about the future of this book, which is of course the present: how’s that linked-ponds water-treatment system working outside of Varanasi? What has happened to the Biblioteca Alexandrina since the Arab Spring, and how was it doing before that? This morning, I read a piece about Ranomafana National Park, in Madagascar, home to many species of lemur. According to Stille, the Park was established at the instigation of a Brooklyn woman called Patricia Wright. Wright was a social worker when she and her then husband bought a nocturnal owl monkey as a pet — and, the next thing you know, she became a credentialed primatologist.

Dr Wright maintains a Web site, and there is a Wikipedia entry that appears to have been written by an extremely sympathetic hand. Stille’s essay is not online, and its account of Wright’s efforts is complicated by conflicting estimations of their merits. I came away thinking that, however good at tracking lemurs she might might be, Wright is negligibly equipped to run a complex conservation and development program in a third-world town, and from abroad (she teaches at Stony Brook) — an inaptitude made locally catastrophic by her apparent ability to charm pots of money out of anybody, once. But the Wikipedia entry for the Ranomafana National Park does not mention her, or anybody else.

As for the Biblioteca Alexandrina, it seems, from its Wikipedia entry, to have turned out to be the extravagant dud that Stille was too polite to predict.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 17th, 2013 at 1:01 pm.