Seduced by Moleskine
I was in the local bookstore several days ago with our youngest daughtershadowing her while she expertly re-arranged a low table filled with children's books. While issuing a stream of instruction”don't pick it up like that turn the pages from the edge don't crease the pages put it back where you go it from no we're not buying any today”I spied a familiar shelf just off to one side. A shelf filled with Moleskine notebooks.
They are my kryptoniteas evidenced by the slowly growing ranks of neat black spines on the shelf of the study behind me.
You see I live in a world, and a life filled with technology and gadgets. I sit in front of computers for endless hours during the day, and almost always carry a smart phone around in my pocket during waking hours. The phone keeps my diary, remembers everybody's phone numbers, passwords and license keys, and a number of electronic books that might be read while commuting.
Even though I have this wonderful “encyclopaedia galactica” in my pocket, there is still something about a paper notebook.
There is something about the act of writing on good quality paper, in a bound book, with a good pen. It screams a message”I am writing!“. There is something tactile and solid about making a markyour markand recording a thought forever. Perhaps it forces a change in your mindsetsitting, pen in hand, one leg crossed over the other to support your notebook.
I might write poetry, or draw pictures, or draft passages for my blog. I might make notes of the people sitting nearby. I might solve equations.
The Moleskine notebooks have something of a historythey were “the legendary notebook of Van Gogh, Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse and Cline”. Perhaps through owning and using one I might stand on the shoulders of such literary giants, and channel their talent through my pen.
So herein lies the questionwhich would you choosethe modern, efficient, digital device, or the tried, trusted, friendly notebook? I know which I would prefer, and I look longingly at them every time I visit the bookstore.