The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper
Finished — 2025-10-28
Started — 2025-10-04
Cousin Steve and I have been journaling and notebooking since we both bought locking diaries in 1990. (I copied him, as was typical.) He suggested that this book could be a good one for us to venture through together, and he sure was right. My first copy, procured at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park on a work trip, didn’t survive more than an hour or so before I gave it to Celine at our Dinner of Books (along with a Hofstadter and a Dawkins). Back home, I found a copy at Kinokuniya in Shinjuku and bought it again.
The historical accounts were vivid and human, and just as Steve warned, I had a hard time stopping myself from burning through the book too fast. What a thrill it is to feel oneself as a tiny part of the majestic human intellectual tradition.
Four hundred pages into the notebook, between a maths puzzle and an estimate of the wood needed to build a Flanders galley, sits a full-length illustration of a man carrying a child through water. Any of Michael’s contemporaries would have instantly recognised Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child. Uniquely among the saints, Christopher required no prayer to secure his protection. Instead, the mere sight of his image would shield the viewer from harm: just one glance at this every morning and Saint Christopher would be watching over him all day, protecting him from the hazards of travel by land or sea — and in particular, sudden death and melancholy. Which was why, when the team finally had the chance to hold the notebook in their hands, they found this page more worn than any other: well-thumbed, grubby, and softened by turning. Evidently Michael had, indeed, checked in every morning, blessing his endeavours with a sight of the saint.
Chaucer:
For when thy labour doon al ys, And hast mad alle thy rekenynges, In stede of reste and newe thynges Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon, And, also domb as any stoon, Thou sittest at another book Tyl fully daswed ys thy look.
Basically “Heh, we look at books all day at work and then go home and look at books”
Allen complains that Chaucer wrote about a zibaldone but didn’t call it that; instead we got the worse term “commonplace-book”
De Copia as the first systematic guide to commonplacing Excerpts meant to be organized under headwords (like my durable notes) The “ordinary” meaning of commonplace came after, to describe passages premade for copying down!
The polymath Anna Maria van Schurman - one of the first women to attend a European university - contributed a somewhat intimidating page in Arabic and ancient Greek, two of the fourteen languages she knew: “A day is better for the scholar than a lifetime for the ignorant', the Arabic translates.
And just as friends used to seal their fellowship with an inspiring quotation and a sketch, so today some strengthen their bonds by exchanging motivational statements set against majestic landscapes or cat pictures. In Wittenberg and Amsterdam, they had blank books; today we have Facebook and Linkedin, which, despite their many advantages, are less substantial than their hard-copy precursor in its heyday. After all, no-one has yet plea-bargained their way from murder to manslaughter by presenting the judge with a list of their Facebook friends.
Perhaps I should be collecting mentions of FB in books I read. This is far from the first…
Melville visiting Oxford:
Learning in Oxford lodged like a baron. Garden to every college. Lands for centuries never violated by sordid labor - profane hand of enterprise - sacred to beauty & tranquility… Every college has dining halls & chapel - soul & body equally provided for. Grass smooth as green baize of a billiard table. I know nothing more fitted by a mild & beautiful rebuke to chastise the sophomorean pride of America.
The reveal of Isaac Newton is astonishing, and makes me want to reread the Baroque Cycle
Gasped when I saw that Darwin brought Paradise Lost ashore on his observation forays from the Beagle
Unsurprisingly, the mostly illiterate inhabitants of the post-Roman world didn’t keep diaries either, though some flirted with the idea. In the seventh century, Saint John Climacus reported visiting a monastery near Gaza where every brother carried a small wax tablet on his belt. If one found himself committing (or considering) a sin, he would note it on the tablet, and at the end of the day confess it to the abbot, and the tablet would be wiped clean, literally and metaphorically.
Mention of Facebook (cautionary) in the chapter on bullet journaling Which is an especially judgy chapter if you ask me Like it’s his job to decide if bullet journaling is “real” enough even though it has doodles
David Allen mentioned in chapter 29
In 2014, a team led by Dr Rebecca Chamberlain of the University of Leuven, in Belgium, looked inside forty-four heads to search for physical differences between artists' brains and those of the general population, and it made striking findings. Firstly, they observed that skill at drawing closely correlated to increased grey matter in the right medial frontal gyrus - the area that Solso had watched getting busy while Humphrey Ocean drew. Chamberlain’s team also spotted something that Solso hadn’t: a significant growth in grey matter on the left anterior lobe of the cerebellum, an area behind your left earhole that governs fine muscle control. Finally, they saw a difference between the brains of hobbyists who were merely good at drawing, and those who had enjoyed full-time training. Art school attendance yields an area of denser grey matter in the right precuneus, an area towards the top and back of your skull that deals with visual imagery and three-dimensional forms. By comparing their work with other studies, Chamberlain’s team could postulate that six months' training would not be enough to build up this grey matter: three years of training and regular drawing practice would be. Typically, Renaissance artists were apprenticed for three to five years.
Just fascinating to think of long practice as gradual densening of connectome in a specific low-entropy arrangement But not “just as bodybuilders lay down muscle” like Allen states; muscle doesn’t contain (nearly as much) information
Clark & Chalmers: the extended mind hypothesis Cf. Dawkins’ extended phenotype And Hofstadter’s diffuse identity