Lauren

he reader completes thecircuit, because he influences the author both before and after the act ofcomposition. Authors are readers themselves. By reading and associating withother readers and writers, they form notions of genre and style and a generalsense of the literary enterprise, which affects their texts, whether they arecomposing Shakespearean... See more

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not.

Nor can one let the pen write without guidance; for fear of becoming slack and untidy. . . .

But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly com pulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only acciden tally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself

It all comes back. Even that recipe for sauerkraut: even that brings it back. I was on Fire Island when I first made that sauerkraut, and it was raining, and we drank a lot of bourbon and ate the sauerkraut and went to bed at ten, and I listened to the rain and the Atlantic and felt safe. I made the sauerkraut again last night and it did not make... See more

But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talk ing here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consump tion, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées ;... See more

eepers of private notebooks are a differ ent breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.