Nicole Junkerman on Keeping Notes You Return To

A notebook fills faster than anybody expects. By the end of a year most of what is in it has already done its work: a time, a street, a title half remembered, a number with no name beside it. None of that was wasted. Very little of it is ever read twice. Nicole Junkerman keeps the atlas partly to find out which notes survive a second reading, and the honest answer is a small and slightly surprising handful.

The ones that last share a quality that is hard to plan for. They were written slowly enough to carry a reason. Walk up through the old quarter at six is a fact, and facts go stale. Walk up through the old quarter at six, because the light runs along the street rather than across it, is something a reader can still use a year later, including the reader who wrote it. The reason is the part that survives, and the reason is the part most often dropped when a note is made in a hurry.

There is a second quality, which is tone. A note written to impress nobody reads better than one written with an audience half in mind. The second kind tends to tidy itself while it is being made, and the tidying removes exactly the odd detail that would have brought the afternoon back. Keeping the odd detail is the whole skill. A page that records the wrong turn, the closed door and the unexpected hour is more useful later than a page that records only the version that worked.

Rereading is the part that turns a pile into a shelf. Once a month is enough: an hour with the older pages and a pencil, marking the handful that still say something and leaving the rest alone. Nothing needs to be thrown away. The point is not tidiness, it is knowing where the good pages are, so that the next time a question comes up there is somewhere to look other than memory. The notebook pages here work the same way, and so do the shorter entries on the writing page.

What keeps the habit going is low expectations. A note does not have to be an essay, and most of them should not try. Two sentences and a date will outlast a paragraph written in a voice borrowed from somewhere else. The test is simple enough to apply on the spot: would a stranger with no memory of the day understand why this was worth writing down? If the answer is no, one more clause usually fixes it.

Late October is a good month for this. The year has enough behind it to be worth sorting and not so much that sorting feels like an undertaking. The reading page gathers what came of it this year, and the atlas keeps going at the same pace it always has, a page and an afternoon at a time.