Emerson and His Notebooks
I have been reading Robert D. Richardson’s 1995 biography Emerson: The Mind On Fire. I find myself more fascinated by Emerson’s use of notebooks than by his actual writing or transcendentalism. Halfway through the biography, it seems to me that Emerson thought through his notebooks. By the end of his life, he’d filled hundreds of them. It was Emerson who asked a young Henry David Thoreau, “Do you keep a journal?” setting Thoreau down a path that would lead to his famous journals.
I’ve written before of my fascination with journals and diaries and notebooks. That fascination has, over the years, manifested itself in attempts to reproduce the use of journals and notebooks in digital form: first with Evernote, and later with Obsidian. These are fun experiments, but ultimately, for me, they are failed experiments. All of the exciting features that digital tools bring (linking, searching, etc.) never seem to live up to the value I get from notebooks, from paper. I’ve given this a lot of thought and one conclusion I’ve arrived at is that possibly this is a bridge too far across the digital divide. I grew up writing everything down: letters, schoolwork, early diaries and journals. It wasn’t until college that I began to use a computer for writing, and then, initially, it was not for notes but for final drafts of papers and essays. Like Emerson, I think better on paper. And yet, the “paper” always seems more cumbersome than its digital counterpart. This makes the digital world appealing, and accounts for my many experiments.
It seems odd to me that a number of seemingly practical skills were, for the most part, left out of my education. With one exception—a fantastic 7th grade science teacher—I was never taught how to take notes, either in a classroom lecture or from my reading. I was never taught how to do research: that is, I was never taught the process of going about research, the dos and don’ts. No one ever told me to go to primary sources wherever possible. No one told me how to look for what I needed. I was never taught to write a journal. These seem to me to be practical skills, but I had to figure them out on my own.
In Emerson’s time, things were different. As Richardson writes,
One thing he had learned in college was how to keep journals. Beginning in 1819, when he was a sophomore, Emerson began keeping a college theme notebook as well as a list of books he had read1. A third notebook, begun for drafts of his college essays on Socrates, turned into a notebook for poetry. A fourth, begun in 1820 for notes in a lecture course… grew into a general notebook for drafts of essays and poems. Also in 1820 he began a series of notebooks, each called “Universe,” each with a number, which were commonplace books full of quotations from his reading.
Emerson learned this in college and it seems to me that these journals and notebooks became his primary tool for thinking. Much later in the biography, as Emerson is starting to write his Essays, Richardson notes how Emerson had tried to be systematic about his journals from the start. He writes,
Emerson’s journals were now numerous. There were perhaps as many as a hundred by 1839, and just finding specific entries in the shelves of his notebooks was a problem that increased with time. He made an index of each journal’s contents in the back of it. By 1838 he began making lists of topics, entering under each topic a list of passages that might apply, giving location symbols and page numbers by which he could locate each passage. By 1843 he had a separate notebook with a topic at the head of each page and for each topic dozens of one-sentence references to passages in the journal. By 1847 he had a 400-page master index of topics, each followed by scores, even by hundreds of short quotes and location symbols.
Richardson goes on to make an important point:
These indexes themselves… represent many months and perhaps years of work all by themselves.
But that work was also learning. Emerson wasn’t just using the notebooks to organize his thought, cull what he had captured to find the best material. And in doing so, he learned the material better and better as he went along. This is something that never worked well for me in my attempts at digital notes and notebooks. The ease of search, the linking of notes made it too easy in some regards. The tools did all of the work and I did almost none, the reverse of Emerson’s situation.
There has always been, for me, a lure to technology, a promise of something better through it. The truth, in my experience, has been something less than the promise. I started my Going Paperless experiment because, throughout the second half of the 1990s, I’d been reading about this elusive paperless office, but had never seen one in practice. Was it possible? I wondered. For some people, perhaps, but growing up, as I did, on paper, so to speak, I found that the vision and the reality rapidly came into conflict.
In one of my favorite of Isaac Asimov’s essays, “The Ancient and the Ultimate2,” Asimov wrote about the evolution of books. He predicted how they would become electronic, how they would allow us to carry entire libraries with us. They would need a power source but over time that too would be improved. They would grow smaller and more compact. They would remember exactly where you left off reading. The end result was—the very paper books that we have today. I feel the same way about notebooks. They can grow, evolve, morph into a digital form, but the ultimate, to me, seems to be on paper.
Emerson’s model is interesting to me because it worked for him. He was systematic. He thought on paper. I suspect that this was not uncommon generally in his time, but that he was uncommon specifically.
My kids don’t have notebooks the way I had them in school. They have laptops and iPads. Their “notebooks” are Google Docs and other digital forms. They’ve grown up this way, but I wonder if it impacts the way we think: on paper versus on a keyboard or tablet? And I don’t see anyone teaching them how to take notes, or how to do research, or how to keep a journal. The medium for journaling has morphed from the long-form, handwritten journal to the quick Instagram or Snapchat post. Notes, journals, diaries have been a source of historical context and value for thousands of years. It seems a bit of a shame to see that fading away into the digital event horizon.
At least I started keeping a list of books I’d read!
