In A Blank Book, Red

Posted on July 13, 2003 in Possessions Reading

I’ve begun to do something that I haven’t done seriously in years: I mark passages in the books I read for copying later in a bound red book. I have learned that it is foolish to buy the expensive bound volumes you see near the cash registers in book stores for use as diaries or notebooks. You get this feeling that only good words can go in them. So your pen freezes, you make excuses, you back away from your commitment to write every day. And the pages go blank.

Such books work very well for this other purpose, that of recording fine words. I am no calligrapher, so the entries I make are sloppy. I count on the beauty of the writing to carry the moment and make the investment worth it.

As I transcribe, I keep a bottle of Wite Out at hand to paint out the misturns of my pen. When I have finished a page, I look over what I have saved and then turn it to begin on the back.

Today, I savored and retained some words of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, including this passage:

….it is with God we must be careful; for He makes such a powerful appeal to what is lowest in human nature — our feeling of insufficiency, fear of the unknown, personal failings; above all our monstrous egotism which sees in the martyr’s crown an athletic prize which is really hard to attain.

I do not know if I agree with Durrell on all these points, but the words score me, make me think. It makes them worth keeping.

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Here’s one I found turning by turning back a page:

Some men who call themselves pessimists because they cannot read good into the operations of nature forget that they cannot read evil. In morals the law of competition no more justifies personal, official, or national selfishness or brutality than the law of gravitation justifies the shooting of a bird. — Vernon Kellogg