Richard Mabey suggested that Gilbert White thought of his journal as his “intellectual ledger, where he took stock of his understanding of the physical world.”
In his journal, White, 1720-1793, wasn’t really writing — it was more thinking. Mabey lists some of the usual things that writers do that White omitted: literary illusions, self-examination, searches for meaning.
The writing came later. White turned the journal entries into a series of letters, published as The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne in 1789. Mabey edited the Penguin Classics edition.
I’m interested in Mabey’s remark because I’m interested in journals and people who keep them. I sometimes think this concatenation of notes online is a kind of journal. Like White — or Mabey’s perceptive view of White — I think of it as thinking more than writing.
• Source: Ronald Blythe’s essay “Richard Mabey at Selborne” was collected in Field Work; Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2007, pp. 264-8. The quotation is on p. 266.
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