A Notebook of Small Observations
For about six months I have carried a notebook on walks. Nothing elaborate: a soft-covered exercise book, a pencil, and the small discomfort of an extra thing in your coat.
The trouble with a notebook is not carrying it. It is deciding what counts. Almost everything looks worth writing down while it is happening, and almost nothing is by evening. The bird that was unusual, the man who said something funny at the bus stop, the light on a wall, all of it seemed important at the time, and now there is a page of forty-one fragments that read like the diary of a person with nothing else to report. Which is not, I would argue, nothing.
What I have settled on is a rule: write the sentence, not the mood. If I can catch the actual words, I write them down, and the mood takes care of itself, because the words carry it. If I only have the mood, I leave the page blank, on the grounds that a page of adjectives is a page that will embarrass me later.
Writing also slows the walk, which is the real argument for it. Once I have a pencil in my hand, the street stops being scenery and becomes something to be read. I have found doors I have walked past for a decade, and I have written down three words about a shop window that I would not otherwise have seen at all.
The other half of the practice is throwing things away. At the end of the year I put the whole stack on the floor and read it straight through and keep perhaps a tenth. The rest is scaffolding; it was only useful while I was building the thing, which turned out to be the noticing, and not the record.
I do keep the notebooks. They are in a drawer, in order, and my wife says she will want to read them after I am gone, which is one way of knowing that they are not really for me.