Notebook
11 February 2008 by mm
Like many writers I have a notebook that I carry around for recording observations, quotes, scenes, thoughts, snippets of dialog, attempts at poems, and some of the crazy ideas I get that might someday be the impetus for a writing project. It’s an analog device with two components: a school composition book with sewn binding and a pen clipped to a few of the inside pages. When I’ve filled up one of these volumes I keep it with the others on a shelf. Periodically I go through them looking for anything interesting. Here’s something I found this morning:
30 July 2002 Tuesday 10:10 pm
“And Thanatos, or what we think of as the Greek personification of death, is not really a personification, but a mist or veil or cloud that separates the still living person from life. For the Greeks, who had no word for irreversible death, one did not die; one darkened.”
The Weather of Words (2002)
p. 6
Love this - the quote itself, which is very much how my Classical heart understands death, and the presence and function of the notebook. I usually scribble these things on whatever scrap is at hand, then find those scraps later serving as bookmarks in other books, littering the left-hand drawer of my desk (rubber bands, paper clips, conditional realities).
A recent one, from the drawer, on the back of a receipt for a gallon of paint:
“In letters as in love, to imagine is to address oneself to what is not.”
Anne Carson, from Eros the Bittersweet.
Oh, Anne Carson. I love her books.
Yeah, I’ve written stuff down on scattered scraps, too: post-it notes, corners of newspapers, match books, used envelopes, business cards, etc.
Here’s a thought: take all those scraps and get them bound into a tiny flip book: scribbled ideas on the verso, pre-printed ephemera on the recto. What a one-of-a-kind object that would be.