It’s hard to explain to the uninitiated the pleasures of a bookstore. Here’s a stab at it:
For years, I’ve had a running page in my endless series of composition books labeled “String too short to be saved.”
Each page with this odd heading is a place for mere suggestions of notes — notes that are too short to be a proper note. The jotting might remind me to think harder and make a note out of the scrap.
All this might sound odd, but keepers of notebooks are a bit eccentric.
I got the title from a collection of stories about a New England farm by Donald Hall. I’d read about Hall’s book somewhere, which has this epigraph:
A man was cleaning the attic of an old house in New England and he found a box which was full of tiny pieces of string. On the lid of the box there was an inscription in an old hand: “String too short to be saved.”
Bookstores in my part of the world aren’t exactly crammed with old books about farms in New England.
And then there it was.
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