The Brown Notebook: An Introduction

I like the idea of classical wisdom that exists today only because the wisdom-dispenser's acolytes took notes—the original manuscript does not survive, or the w.d. never wrote anything down to begin with. Cf. Confucius and—is it Plato or Aristotle? Aristotle, I think. His students took good notes.

He taught Alexander the Great.

I bring up the idea of good note-taking because the thing I've been reading lately, the thing I've been living inside of these last couple weeks, is a brown notebook that I kept from July 30, 2000 to January 1, 2001. My notebook-keeping is such that I write in several notebooks concurrently; often, notebooks remain unfilled for years. But the brown notebook seems to have been a pretty straight shot.

Typical of my notebooks, I'm not entirely sure which entries are factual (i.e., observations on my real life) and which are practice runs for something I want to put into a novel or short story. What to make of this?:

"I spent most of the day before I turned thirty curled in a fetal ball, eyeing the clusters of dust and hair and crumbs that had colonized the wood floor."

Totally depressing! Yet I have a dim feeling that that's not what happened at all; indeed, that turning thirty wasn't such a big deal to me, for some reason.

I just flipped a few pages forward in the brown notebook, and came across an entry not unrelated to the theme of this project, THE DIZZIES:

"Pisa Syndrome (in THE LANCET): excessive leaning to one side, found in those treated for Alzheimer's."

Unfortunately, the recent nonfiction book TILT does not discuss Pisa Syndrome.

This entry is running out of theme-steam, so I'll end with a quote—about DeChirico's "habit of declining to recognize his early works and repudiating all responsibility for them."

I am not repudiating the brown notebook. In fact I am rather in love with the brown notebook. I am its most devoted scholar. I would require three more notebooks, or three hundred, to explain its contents.