The writer Trigorin, in Chekhov’s The Seagull, always carried a notebook with him in which he jotted down ideas or snatches of conversation that interested him and that might have proved useful to him in the future. I have tried to develop the Trigorin habit myself, but unfortunately I have often forgotten to take my notebook with me precisely when it would have been most useful.
The other problem with such notebooks as I do succeed in filling is that, within hours, I cannot decipher the meaning or context of what I have written. And even when I can decipher my notes, I am unsure what use I shall ever be able to put them to. Recently in a cemetery, for example, I took down the words attached to some flowers left by a friend at the recently dug grave of a young man killed in a car accident. ‘Hope you are all right,’ it said, which I suppose indicates some residual belief in the afterlife in our post-religious society; but what use was it for me to write this down?
Or how about this overheard in a café? ‘I bought a bicycle for my next-door neighbour who’s 99, but she won’t use it.’
Or yet again, looking up the dates of a surgeon recently in Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons, I came across the following sentence in the life of Richard Vaughan Payne, which for some reason I committed to my notebook. ‘His right arm was amputated in 1952, but he continued to practise as a consultant.’
I have heard of one-armed pianists, of course, but never of one-armed surgeons.
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