Friday, September 15, 2023

A jotter speaks of daydreaming

 Jottings are the tracks that a thinker makes. Maybe that’s a good way to look at it.

Roger Deakin was a thinker, and the prolific jottings seem to have followed naturally.

One of Deakin’s friends, the writer Robert Macfarlane, said that when Deakin bought his 16th-century house, it was mostly in ruins. Deakin gradually rebuilt it. At the start, the only habitable place was the inglenook, so Deakin threw a sleeping bag by the fireplace and started there. He gradually hauled a collection of sheds, huts and a railroad wagon to the farm. He liked to work in small, quiet, isolated places. Here’s an excerpt from a notebook:

 

In my cabin I learnt the sheer luxury of daydreaming. It has been my making and my undoing too. How many days, weeks, months have I lost to it? But perhaps it isn’t lost time at all, but the most valuable thing I could have done.

 

Some people will recognize a kindred spirit in that jotting.

Daydreaming is a kind of thinking, and I like to think. And I’m interested in how ideas in mind often occur when there’s a pencil in hand.

• Source: Roger Deakin, “Notebooks: ‘Daydreaming has been my making and my undoing’”; Granta, No. 102, 2008, pp. 233-44. The quote is on p. 244.

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