So the experience is kindred for all manner of minds. The poet may exult too feverishly at first, and grow tired of his own rhapsodies; the reflective intellectual may become bored by his own meditations. But neither the poetic rhapsodies nor the intellectual notes record the measure of the tramp. For it is a measure of hidden honey that is being stored, and you are seldom allowed by Nature to eat of your own store day by day. We are bees rather than wasps.
The true beehive of inner experience is in you, and yet, of course, there are what may be called auxiliary beehives. I believe the conscious experience of a tramp can be greatly increased in a pleasurable way by the use of notebooks. It is worth while keeping a record if only to remind yourself in other years. The details of your spiritual adventures fade out unless you have a good memory or an aide-mémoire. The whole work of some writers is no more than a tramp’s notebook, Blake, for instance, a series of marvelously scrawled hieroglyphics—the story of his journey from one world to another. But one does not need to be a “writer” as it is called, or an “artist.” It is a spurious classification. We are all writers and artists from the day when we scrawl with our toy spades in the wet sand to the day when we put the seal of death to our wills. Man as such is an artist. Being public, being printed, being exhibited, are matters connected with the minor function of being professionally artistic. Giotto drew a perfect circle to show what he could do. We shall draw imperfect ones and be more true to Art.
The fact is he has lost a great deal who has not kept a daybook of the soul. Something very sweet happened to Leigh Hunt one day and he wrote.
Time you thief who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.
It was entered in his daybook. Certain happenings make a day worth while and perhaps forever memorable to you. “To-day I knew that I had conquered all my doubtings,” wrote Carlyle once in his diary, recording his transit from scepticism to positive belief. It was an entry in his daybook.
As a practical detail, I love page-a-day diaries, the new sort used mostly in America and France. It is a nicely bound thin-paper book with a whole page for each day in the year and no postal information or cash columns. Unfortunately in England such books are generally bound to look like Bibles and have appropriate Scripture references at the head of each page. One is reminded of the Lessons and the Collects. That is very well, but we require a minimum of printed matter on our daily page. It is ours, like our life when we wake up in the morning, free and open, and we may write there only what is given to us personally to write. Such a notebook should be free from conventions. If we wish to draw sketches in it mixed with written notes, we will. If we need to overstep the limits of a page we will find a less-covered page among our yesterdays and let to-day spill over to fill out the measure of time past. If you have had a tramping expedition in the midst of an otherwise sedentary year how the empty pages will fill up from the more glorious days!
The artist’s notebook is free for sketches, notes, impressions of moments, bon mots, poems, things overheard, maps and plans, names of friends and records of their idiosyncrasies, paradoxes, musical notations, records of folksongs and other songs which you copy in order that you may sing for years afterwards. But it should not contain too much banal detail, such as petty accounts, addresses, druggists’ prescriptions, number of season ticket and fire-insurance policy, memos to send rent. These things are apt to clutter up your book, and when you come to Old Year’s Night, and sit waiting for the chime of bells which rings in another year—and you have your daybook before you, and you go over its pages, you do not want to pause on a scrawled laundry list or some Falstaffian account of wine and bread consumed at such and such an inn.
The artist’s daybook is his own living gospel—something coming after Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and should be sacred to him, if he is not merely a flippant and cynical fellow seeing life in large part as a buffonade.
A thought recorded, one that is your own, written down the day when it occurred, is a mental snapshot, and is at least as valuable as the photographs you may take on your journey. Yesterday’s thought is worth considering again, if only as the stepping stone of your dead self.