A Private Notebook

You might wish for fame or acclaim or recognition, but you rarely want an accurate spotlight that peers too deep.

Lisbon 2017

In the beginning of Ian McEwan’s novel Lessons, a detective takes an uninvited and unwelcomed look through the personal notebook of Roland Baines. A short time later Roland is left alone to contemplate the damage.

An innocent pact between thought and page, idea and hand, had been ruptured. Or polluted. An intruder, a hostile presence had made him dismissive of his own phrasing. He was forced to read himself through another’s eyes and struggle against a likely misreading. Self-consciousness was the death of a notebook.

Roland’s experience just might trigger a shiver of recognition. Having your notebook or a private journal read is, for many people, indistinguishable from having your thoughts read, which is an experience nearly everyone would prefer to avoid. Even without any grand secrets or a shameful past, the typical desire is to select what’s revealed: you can be the boldest exhibitionist yet still occasionally close the door.

You might wish for fame or acclaim or recognition, but you rarely want an accurate spotlight that peers too deep—it requires an intruder or a hostile presence to access the unvarnished and unmediated truth of what’s intimate and vulnerable and embarrassing. The more typical wish is for a very particular type of publicity: the elevation of a desired persona, the concealment of what’s underneath.

But there’s no control left once the private thoughts in a notebook become public. When a stranger reads words that you expected to keep secret, the pages are raw and irrevocable, and there’s no safeguard “against a likely misreading.” The stranger has grabbed a scalpel, opened your skull, and is now scrutinizing your brain. You’re helpless on the table, with any further explanation about your sentences beyond your control: you’ve lost the possibility to inhabit the ideal persona while you deliver your lines, to fix your mistakes, to change your mind, to calculate your exact words, as you’re under the spotlight and, for once, fully seen.

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Yet all this yearning for secrecy also comes when exhibitionism seems to be a feature of our time. To walk down the street is to listen to intimate phone calls and hear private, unsought conversations. To ride the train is to hear long, meandering, and banal stories from your neighbor. To meet a stranger is to be given a medical history and a listing of childhood horrors. Feel free to cross out the words decorum and comportment and propriety from your dictionary because now, it seems, you can have an amorous dinner conversation on a plane and deliver your most shocking campfire story at a funeral.

The uncomfortable truth is that most people aren’t too worried about exposing uncomfortable secrets—they’re worried about exposing what they suspect is the truth. Few people actually possess secrets about nuclear codes or unsolved murders or clandestine affairs, but they are busy concealing, well, more underwhelming secrets. About inadequacies. Failures. Whether they’re actually undesirable. And perhaps you, too, might be inadequate, a failure, or even undesirable. Isn’t that at least possible? Right? Obviously it is worth knowing that the truth of those questions isn’t really the crucial factor—it is whether you have the slightest doubt when you ask.

In a well-used private notebook you can explore, perambulate, backtrack, question, it is where all those doubts, for an instant, slip away; and all that fiddling doesn’t have to be directed, or even that organized, as a simple exploration of novel and intriguing and unexpected thoughts are sufficient. Nevertheless, it is absolutely the last place where you want to read “through another’s eyes,” as that will make introspection or discovery nearly impossible, which is why “self-consciousness [is] the death of a notebook.”

And self-consciousness, the awareness that you’ve been observed in a private moment, triggers a particular type of discomfort. It is the discomfort of seeing yourself from a distance. It is the discomfort that you feel when someone catches you looking at a mirror, which is a bit peculiar because everybody looks at a mirror. We just like, however, to pretend that we’re indifferent, that there’s nothing to hide, that our words are always spontaneous, that there’s never a mask atop the face, that we don’t have a split between the public and the private.

Thus we’re stuck playing a rather absurd game of pretending indifference, though we happen to know that everyone else is playing, too, even those who boast and overshare and chatter, as we sense, when we listen closely, that they are still selective, they are still calculating, because even the most grandiose person has subjects that are never quite on the table. And whenever a private notebook contains a few scribbled thoughts, a plan or two, a distant memory, then perhaps it just might disclose too much, because it just might shatter the veneer between the desired persona and the reality.