Noted (Newsletter)

This past February, I was at a conference when another English professor said, “We need to go back to eighteenth-century ways of learning.” Immediately, I thought, Yes! We need more time with notebooks. Students in the eighteenth century relied on pen, paper, printed books, and lectures. They didn’t have the sprawl of tools we have access to. For many eighteenth-century students, learning meant recording information in notebooks. In some ways, that hasn’t changed.

There I was, two decades ago, a second-year Ph.D. student curled in a library chair, when it happened. I fell in love. It felt exactly the way movies depict it. Like being struck by Cupid’s arrow. In a matter of minutes, my life changed. I finished the first page of Middlemarch, turned to my friend, and said: “I’ve just found my favorite book of all time. I am in love with George Eliot.” Every subsequent page confirmed my devotion.

Drafts are beautiful. This is the conclusion I’ve come to after spending the summer intensively working on this book. I sent the full manuscript to my editor on August 15th, two days ago. This summer, I’ve been deep in it, and enjoying the sustained focus the final stages of a project require. It’s one of my favorite parts of writing: the late stages when ideas and sentences begin to crystallize.

As I’ve mentioned, my book is due on August 15th! I haven’t left New York—or the library—at all this summer, but for those of you off adventuring somewhere (or exploring closer to home), I’m resurfacing a favorite post about travel notes! Last Summer, I visited friends in Bilbao, Spain. During solo day trips, I clutched my phone like a lifeline, following that little blue dot on my maps app along the winding cobblestone streets of Pamplona and San Sebastián.

The future author of Paradise Lost, John Milton, married a woman almost half his age. He was 34 and Mary Powell was 17. Within weeks, she left him and returned to her family. Their marriage had a lot of problems, least of which being the age gap. Most pressing: Milton supported the parliament in the widening civil conflict, while her family supported the king.1 But divorce as we know it wasn’t an option in seventeenth-century England.

If you ran into Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) in Vienna, where he spent most of his adult life, you might have found him scribbling in a little notebook. He often worked out musical ideas in these sketchbooks, capturing inspiration as it came to him. But by 1818, he was carrying small pocket notebooks for an entirely different purpose. He could no longer hear what his friends were saying. In 1801, he confided to friends that he was having trouble hearing.

Now that we’re in July, Substack has slowed down a bit and I’m deep into book editing.1 To honor the slowness of the summer, I’m introducing an occasional series called “Notations”—shorter, more focused versions of the usual Noted essays. Each post will center on a single notebook kept by a historical figure—like Katharine Hepburn’s promptbook, which I’m thrilled to share with you today.

On July 4th, 1776, the Second Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence. Exactly fifty years later, its author, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) died on July 4th, 1826—waiting to see one more birthday of the country he helped to found. This week—two hundred and fify years after the Declaration—we celebrate America: the improbable, still ongoing, experiment of running a country free from tyranny.

This is how Didion defines a writer: “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.”1 Anyone who has read Didion’s writing will not be surprised by this definition—her prose could only have been written by a person who passionately arranged words, hour after hour, day after day. Before I went to see Joan Didion’s papers at the New York Public Library, I read all the reports claiming the archive gives us new insight into Didion’s writing process.

There comes a point when one’s trail of notes exceeds one’s ability to remember them. I am well past that point. I’ve amassed more than seventy notebooks over the past two decades. But I’ve never sat down to make them searchable…until now. Ever since I wrote about Emerson’s tips for finding notes two years ago, I’ve wanted to try his indexing system. So I set myself the task of going through my notebooks from graduate school onward (about 21 years’ worth of notes).