Copying a handful of passages out here with no organizing theme, on purpose, in the spirit of this note — the point of the old commonplace-book habit wasn’t that every entry fit a tidy category, just that it was worth keeping and worth being able to find again.
There’s a line from a nineteenth-century naturalist’s notebook, unpublished in his lifetime, that says almost nothing on its own — ‘today, nothing; the weather did not permit observation’ — and that I’ve thought about more than almost any single sentence I read last year, because it’s a rare example of someone recording the absence of an entry as itself worth an entry. Most diaries just skip the day. This one insisted on marking the gap.
There’s also a much more ordinary one, from a letter, about how ‘the middle of a long piece of work always looks like a failure from the inside, because you can see everything wrong with it and nothing of what it will eventually hide,’ which I now think about every single time I’m in the middle of anything and it feels like it’s going badly. It’s usually right.