Book of Sighs

My friend Tom gave me my first Moleskine notebook in 2004. In it, I have chronicled three years' worth of various travels, excursions, and minor expeditions to the following, some more than once:

• St. Louis, MO
• Chicago, IL
• Portland, OR
• Kansas City, MO
• Martha's Vineyard, MA
• Boston, MA
• Providence, RI
• Phoenix, AZ
• Mendocino, CA
• Gualala, CA
• South Lake Tahoe, NV
• Hartford, CT
• Ely, MN
• San Francisco, CA
• Edinburgh, Scotland
• London, England
• York, England
• Canterbury, England
• Ouray, CO
• Woodstock, IL
• Elko, NV
• Tillamook, OR

I also have recorded certain quotations, such as these:

• From Pascal: "The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first."
• From Kierkegaard: "I can't bother to write what I have just written, and I can't bother to blot it out."
• From Chatwin: "To lose a passport was the least of one's worries: to lose a notebook was a catastrophe."
  

My Moleskine is about two-thirds full now, and I am using it to compose various and occasional descriptions of my trip to Europe. What I am finding, however, is a certain lack of detail. For instance, my first day in London I wrote that I had "navigated the underground to the area near the British Museum." I wrote of spending 15 minutes figuring out how to navigate through the subway tunnels, but I have not one note about what I saw in the museum itself.

Have you heard of the Rosetta Stone, for example?

Leafing through the notebook now, however, I see the same pattern for three years: overviews and highlights, nothing in-depth. Another example: I did not note that, on my second day in London, I awoke to a light snowfall. I have remembered, however, that most of my note-taking involved an even smaller, more portable notebook, and from that one I would transcribe my notes into the one now on the sofa cushion beside me.

So, before describing more about Europe, I need to find the original notes, to un-censor myself. Chatwin was correct: losing a notebook is a catastrophe for a writer. What's worse, though, is to have an incomplete notebook. (We will return to the idea of notebooks when I describe Edinburgh; you'll have to wait for that.)