Unneeded Notebooks

Every acquired book offers the possibility of entering another’s mind. An empty notebook offers the chance to discover one’s own mind. In These Spindrift Pages, Theodore Dalrymple’s observations of his reading encounters, he writes: Simenon bought notebooks without knowing what he was going to write in them or use them for. I have immense quantities of notebooks bought in the same way which I probably could not fill if I wrote for twelve hours a day for the rest of my life, but if I pass a shop that sells notebooks . . . I invariably enter and buy. I suffer from the same compulsion, looking now at a wine crate that formerly contained a dozen bottles, now full of a variety of notebooks acquired from around the world, but especially in London, Tokyo and Paris. There is perhaps a connection to be made with Heinrich von Kleist’s short essay On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking, in which he argued that we don’t necessarily think first and then articulate our thoughts. I…