Today’s newsletter is about keeping track of the movies with watch on pizza night.
One star = Everybody really liked it, would watch again.
Two stars = Everybody loved it, feels like a classic.
Read the rest here, and get Meg’s dough recipe here.
How Darwin started keeping a journal
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…
The days stack up
My logbooks and my diaries from the past couple of years.
Diaries are evidence of our days
“Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life…”
—William Zinsser
2018, if we make it there, will be my 10th year of keeping a daily logbook. What’s a logbook? In the old days, a logbook was a place for sailors to keep track of how far they’d traveled. Mine is just a simple list of the things that happen each day, a sort of reverse appointment book. Every morning I sit down and list what I did, who I saw, what I read/watched/listened to, etc., the previous day. (Because I know everyone will ask, here’s the kind of notebook I use.)
The logbook started, like many creative endeavors, out of sheer laziness. My memory is terrible, so I wanted a record of my days, but I didn’t want to go to the trouble of keeping a “real” diary. The logbook was a way for me to keep a diary without really thinking… or feeling. (Now, I keep a pretty intense notebook and diary, but I still keep my logbook, too.)
What the logbooks have turned into is an index of my life. I consult them to reminisce about important events, like the days my kids were born, but I often consult them for really mundane stuff, like looking up the last time I replaced the air filter on the furnace.
For better or worse, I can tell you what happened to me on every day of the past decade.
I thought about my logbooks this morning when I read about how a Russian chemist’s diaries are being used as evidence of Russian doping in the Olympics. The New York Times article starts like this:
The chemist has kept a diary most of his life. His daily habit is to record where he went, whom he talked to and what he ate. At the top of each entry, he scrawls his blood pressure.
In the diaries, mundane details of his life, like going out to buy a cold medicine and complaining about the Olympic cafeteria food, are juxtaposed against juicier details, like mixing drug cocktails and transporting athlete urine. Here’s a picture of the diary, flagged by attorneys, I’m assuming:
If you want to keep your thoughts secret but archived… do it on paper! The chemist told The Times that he kept the diary on paper “mindfully… not on the computer.” (A crazy detail is that he wrote the diary with a black and gold Watermen pen given to him by his friend, Russia’s former antidoping chief who “died suddenly” after his announcement he was writing a book.)
Whether involved in a scandal or not, diaries are evidence of our days.