Keeping a notebook

 Yesterday’s note about the habit of keeping a commonplace book made me wonder why more people don’t keep some kind of notebook.

The answer, of course, is that keeping a notebook is work.

The reason people forget that it’s work … well, that’s interesting. If you make it a daily practice and if you started long ago, you find that somewhere along the way the work turned into a habit. I have forgotten about the work. It’s just something I do.

William James put it this way:

 

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.

 

The quotation comes from “The Laws of Habit,” the eighth lecture in Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. James quotes a famous regret in Darwin’s autobiography. Darwin said that when he was young, he took pleasure in poetry, especially Shakespeare, and in music. But after years of scientific work, Darwin found he’d lost the ability to find joy in poetry and music. Here’s his lament: 

 

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive....

 

Here’s James’s comment:

             

We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before the destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not to let the greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view. We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled?

 

A few minutes a day with poetry, art, music. A few minutes with the natural world and with friends who can hold a conversation. A few minutes with spiritual and religious ideas — and with the work of philosophers.

That seems like a good life to me. It’s the kind of life that provokes thought, so it’s a good idea to make notes as you go.

• Source: William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1925. Project Gutenberg has it here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16287/16287-h/16287-h.htm#VIII__THE_LAWS_OF_HABIT