This collection of notes has been interested in notes, remarks and aphorisms and in some of their containers, notebooks and pamphlets. It’s failed to consider jottings.
The word comes from Roger Deakin, a writer who was a keeper of notebooks. His friend Robert Macfarlane sorted through hundreds after Deakin died at 63 of a brain tumor.
When he was still in his 20s, Deakin bought a ruined 16th century farmhouse with a moat. He became an observer of nature and country life. Here’s a line from one of his notebooks:
Much as I enjoy the process of writing and the exercise of my own skill and craft in getting it right, nonetheless I would often prefer to be a jotter. Jottings, in their spontaneity and complete absence of any craft, are often so much truer to what I actually feel or think at a given moment.
Like me, Deakin was fan of Gilbert White, a great observer who wrote Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. I’ve thought of White as a note-taker. Perhaps he was a jotter.
• Sources: Roger Deakin, “Notebooks: ‘Daydreaming has been my making and my undoing’”; Granta, No. 102, 2008, pp. 233-44. The quote is on p. 234.
Robert Macfarlane, “Roger Deakin remembered”; The Guardian, 7 May 2010.
For more on short written forms, see “The remark as literary form,” July 4, 2022, and “Mencken on notebooks and remarks” July 5, 2022.
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