Austin Kleon

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How Darwin started keeping a journal

Charles Darwin’s 1837 “Tree of Life” sketch

In 1831, at the age of 22, Charles Darwin learned to keep notebooks by emulating Captain Robert FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle. 

From Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind:

Darwin had never kept a journal before coming aboard the Beagle, for example, but he began to do so under the influence of FitzRoy, whose naval training had taught him to keep a precise record of every happening aboard the ship and every detail of its oceangoing environment. Each day, Darwin and FitzRoy ate lunch together; following the meal, FitzRoy settled down to writing, bringing both the formal ship’s log and his personal journal up to date. Darwin followed suit, keeping current his own set of papers: his field notebooks, in which he recorded his immediate observations, often in the form of drawings and sketches; his scientific journal, which combined observations from his field notebooks with more integrative and theoretical musings; and his personal diary. Even when Darwin disembarked from the ship for a time, traveling by land through South America, he endeavored to maintain the nautical custom of noting down every incident, every striking sight he encountered.

As I understand it, Darwin would take a pencil and a notebook off the ship, and then when he was back on board, he would use pen and ink. (He also switched in between notebooks a lot.)

He wrote, “Let the collector’s motto be, ‘Trust nothing to the memory;’ for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting.”

And:

[A naturalist] ought to acquire the habit of writing very copious notes, not all for publication, but as a guide for himself. He ought to remember Bacon’s aphorism, that Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man; and no follower of science has greater need of taking precautions to attain accuracy; for the imagination is apt to run riot when dealing with masses of vast dimensions and with time during almost infinity.

I’m reminded that another great journalizer, Henry David Thoreau, started keeping his journal at the age of 20, in 1837, because an older man, Ralph Waldo Emerson, asked him whether he kept a journal.

And I’m also thinking about what the relationship of journaling is to pirates and farmers. A captain’s log is kept to keep track of where you’ve been in space and what happened over time. Thoreau’s log is a record of where he’d been in (mostly) the same place and the changes and what happened there over time…

AI as intern

When Kevin Kelly visited me in the studio last week while he was in town for his SXSW talk, I asked him to tell me about AI, something I am not terribly interested in. (One of the pieces of advice in his forthcoming Excellent Advice for Living is: “For a great payoff / be especially curious / about the things you are not interested in.”)

He told me that AI right now is like having a little assistant to boss around and make you some stuff so you can say, “Most of this is garbage, but I can use this part, and you’ve given me something to work with or against.”

Quoting him from elsewhere:

This first round of primitive AI agents like ChatGPT and Dalle are best thought of as universal interns. It appears that the millions of people using them for the first time this year are using these AIs to do the kinds of things they would do if they had a personal intern: write a rough draft, suggest code, summarize the research, review the talk, brainstorm ideas, make a mood board, suggest a headline, and so on. As interns, their work has to be checked and reviewed. And then made better. It is already embarrassing to release the work of the AI interns as is. You can tell, and we’ll get better at telling. Since the generative AIs have been trained on the entirety of human work — most of it mediocre — it produces “wisdom of the crowd”-like results. They may hit the mark but only because they are average.

This, so far, has been the most convincing case I’ve heard.

But then, I’ve always resisted having an assistant — in my experience, doing the “grunt work” of researching, writing a first draft, etc., is where a lot of my good discoveries are made. I want my hands on the work, because that’s how I find it.

(Though I do like bossing Siri around and telling her to remind me of stuff and I do like being a good assistant to my future self.)

More notes from our visit:

Slow learning

I like this “Slow Learning” project that Idler editor Tom Hodgkinson took part in and shared in his (excellent) weekly newsletter.

He and a group of around 15 authors, artists, and teachers came up with a “Manifesto for Slow Learning,” which includes a “Bill of Rights” for the slow learner. (Start each of these with the phrase, “You have the right to…”)

1. Focus on direction, not destination
Immerse yourself completely in the journey and you will reach your final goal gradually.

2. Raise your hand
Asking questions is a fundamental human right.

3. Learn at your own pace
Find your rhythm, find your flow. Don’t compare yourself to others.

4. Unplug
You have the right to disconnect and move your attention towards what’s essential. Learn unplugged, far away from digital distractions.

5. Change your learning path (and mind)
Don’t get too comfortable in the habit zone and start with changing the aversion to change. Think differently and learn new things.

6. Take a break
Micro-breaks, lunch breaks, and longer breaks will all improve your learning performance. You have the right to rest.

7. Make mistakes
Don’t fall into despair but Fail Forward.

8. Leave it unfinished
We live in a super busy, multi-tasking, results-oriented society. Step away from your long to-do list and enjoy once in a while the beauty of an unstructured day.

9. Unlearn and forget
Harness the power of unlearning. Reboot your mind, abandon old knowledge, actions and behaviours to create space.

10. Slow down
Sometimes slow and steady will win the learning race. Make haste slowly.

You can read more in a free book the group put together.

Tom reminds us: “The ancient Greek word for ‘leisure’ or ‘free time’ was ‘skole’ which turned into the Latin word for school.”

I’m a big fan of another manifesto by Tom: “Manifesto of the idle parent.” (Also: Daniel Pennac’s “The rights of the reader.”)

A good assistant to your future self

This morning I was flipping through my copy of the Bicycle Sentences Journal that illustrator Betsy Streeter sent me and I was quite taken with this final paragraph by Grant Petersen. (I’m a big fan of his blog and Just Ride.)

He touches on why I keep a diary, why I keep it on paper, and the magic of keeping a logbook. The mundane details can bring back sublime memories, and what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future: “What seems bland when you write it down… will seem epic in thirty years.”

I have a new studio routine where when I’m unsure of what to write about, I revisit my notebooks each year on today’s date. (I have notebooks going back 20 years, daily logbooks going back 15, but I’ve kept a daily diary for 5 years now. That’s where a lot of gems are buried.)

Flipping through these notebooks will usually yield something worth writing about. (This morning, it was William Burroughs on language.)

Reading my diary this way, which I first learned from reading Thoreau’s diary, also shows me the cycles and patterns of my life.

(For example: Cocteau Twins and the beginning of spring are somehow intertwined in my life. What does that mean? And what does the fact that their lyrics are barely understandable mean when matched with the Burroughs? Spring is a season of rebirth… When babies are new, they babble and make noise without language… do they sound like spring to me for this reason? You can see how these thoughts, none of which I had when I woke up this morning, come forth from just reading myself.)

Another way to think about it: Keeping a diary is being a good research assistant to your future self.

This is the advice that art critic Jerry Saltz has tweeted over the years:

Be a good assistant to yourself. Prepare and gather, make notations and sketches in your head or phone. When you work,  all that mapping, architecture, research & preparation will be your past self giving a gift to the future self that you are now. That is the sacred.

I’ve never had an assistant. I am my own best assistant. My assistant-self is my past self loving my future self who’ll need this previous research when I reach for something in my work. My assistant-self has gotten ideas for whole articles, essays from minutes of research online.

Artists: The beautiful thing about giving yourself a little break & not working – those are the times when new ideas flood in from the cosmos & set your “assistant self” in motion, the self that will be there for your “future-self.” Curiosity and obsession always fill the vacuum.

Artists: Be your own best assistant. Do your research. Get your tools and materials in order. These will be the ancestors, spirit guides and self-replicating imagination of your work. This will allow art to reproduce itself in you. You’ll thank yourself during & afterwards.

I have my many moments of self-loathing at my own lack of progress, but one thing I have done right, at least in the past half decade or so: I have been a good assistant to my future self.

Joan Didion said of re-reading notebooks, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.” This is especially true if they have bothered to preserve themselves so we can visit them later.

Yes, a diary is a good spaceship for time travel: for meditating on the present, flinging ourselves into the future, and visiting ourselves in the past.

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