On Paper Journals

Nobody wants to drink alone. But sometimes you want a drink, and you happen to be alone. When this happens, I recommend you turn it into a writing exercise. Nothing gives public inebriation a more respectable veneer.

Wait, hear me out. Last summer I spent a family holiday in Paris and then a few weeks of solitary travel in Utrecht, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Ghent. There would be opportunities to drink Dutch genever and Trappist ales, and I wanted to occupy myself with something that wasn’t a novel or my phone.

I wanted to write, but I didn’t want to be that person madly typing into a laptop at a bar. Unless you’re Tintin, intrepid boy-reporter, it’s just not done.

So I brought along a paper journal. Just an ordinary spiral-bound notebook from MUJI, its pages of lined cream paper well sized between letter-size and a pocket notebook for notes. A journal suited for prose paragraphs.

Later I developed a fierce loyalty to the slim German Leuchtturm1917 121-page B5 lined notebook with bleed-proof 80 g/sqm paper. It opens with a blank table of contents to document whatever topics unfold on the numbered pages that follow. And its breadth of colours suits my grapheme-color synaesthesia; when I tire of blue or black ink, I switch to green, red, turquoise, or purple. (Those habits are a subject for another day.)

If you’re familiar with Molskine notebooks, the Leuchtturm1917 will be familiar. For reasons probably related to my nationality, living next to a gargantuan country that draws too much attention, I often favour whoever’s second-place in most categories: online retailers, operating systems, ride-share companies. Maybe I resist conformity, so I follow a smaller crowd to give me delusions of free thinking.

But back to my story.

In Amsterdam one rainy morning in July I stepped into a cafe on a side street, found a table under a skylight, ordered a coffee, and wrote the first words in my first journal. Reading those words now, I remember my resistance to pausing amid the tourist’s imperative to see and do more. I pen to paper, and observed the flow of what was happening around and within me.

Journal-writing makes me stop and capture thoughts in words, and set intentions for what I do next. It may not make me more reflective, but it does make my self-examinations concrete. It clears a space for me — like a clearing in a forest that lets me see the trees. I stand back, just half a step, to notice things happening and thoughts occurring.

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster reports someone’s indignation when accused of illogical reasoning: “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” she asks.

This is the effect of my writing. My thoughts are a swirl of impressions and ideas, and writing gives them cohesion and meaning. It’s like Shakespeare’s description of the poet giving “to airy nothing | A local habitation and a name.”

Once I dislodge whatever held them back, words and sentences pour onto the page. Formerly the only thing holding them back was lack of habit, of deliberate space and time — that, and lined paper on cream-coloured pages. In cafes and bars and hotels I filled that first notebook, and then I re-read and summarized my topics and plans. I made resolutions to watch more, better films in public; observations on equanimity and the emergent possibilities of travel in unknown places; decisions about familial and romantic relationships, about my research and my part-time job.

Reading my journals now, I see how they shaped vague, provisional ideas into a firmer orthodoxy, into ways of being and behaving and believing. I was drafting a sort of constitution, figuring out my thoughts and feelings about things. And how to live with those formulations.

If that all sounds like high seriousness, there were also plenty of mundane observations and descriptions of the “Dear Diary” variety: places, people, books and movies, memories. There were extended deliberations, but they led to decisions — because unlike swirls of thought, they felt thorough.

My journals also make it difficult to ignore nagging problems. (Here I’ll switch to the present tense, because those travel notebooks started my present habit of filling a page each day, or every few days.)

By far the most nagging problem is my knowledge that atelic writing — that is, writing without a defined end in mind, like a research article or a public lecture or course outline — comes at the expense of what I could be doing. I always could be doing writing that would expand my list of published works.

Above my desks at home and at work, I’ve posted these words from the Cambridge political scientist David Runciman:

If you don’t keep asking yourself if you have a book then at some point you might have something that starts to look like a book. Writing, instead of being displaced, can be the displacement activity.

What I like about this is the assurance that after you see what you say, you’ll know what you think and can say it better. Sure, my writing a blog post about my atelic writing in paper journals is the ultimate meta-displacement activity. But at some point, who can say what it might begin to resemble?

And then there are the added benefits of an examined life. David Brooks distinguishes between resume virtues and eulogy virtues, between what’s on your resume and what’s in your eulogy. One gives you public recognition, the other private meaning.

I extend that tension to writing. I do some for my resume, and some for myself or for those around me: like birthday cards, and my journals.

They’re not exclusively private musings. One of my 2020 intentions is to publish more journal-like pieces like this one, to circulate them even in a very limited way.

So, like me, if you take a journal with you to the bar you’ll never drink alone. And you may find your own thoughts better companions than you expected.