What the notebook keeps

I have kept a notebook since I was twenty-two. Not diligently — there are gaps of months, one gap of nearly two years — but continuously enough that they fill a shelf now, eleven of them, in no consistent size or colour.

Every so often I take one down expecting to find material. Ideas, overheard lines, the raw ore. That is what I believe I am collecting when I write things down. It is almost never what I find.

What I find instead is weather. Pages and pages of what the light was doing, what I ate, who I was annoyed with, how the flat smelled in August with the windows painted shut. The ideas I carefully recorded have mostly gone dead — they read like someone else's homework, clever and inert. But the weather is alive. I can put a finger on a line about the sound the radiator made in the old place and be entirely, bodily back there.

The notebook is not an idea file. It is a sense file. The ideas were always going to come back on their own; the smell of the hallway was not.

So I have stopped trying to be interesting in it. I write down the temperature. I write down that the woman at the bakery has started saying see you tomorrow instead of goodbye, and that it undid me slightly. None of that is a piece of writing. All of it is the stuff that makes a piece of writing feel like it happened to a body.

The gaps, incidentally, are not failures. They are just the periods when I was living too fast to narrate. I have stopped feeling guilty about those too, though that took longer.