Scribble Day Quotes

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell .Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.

As I sat dumbfounded, seemingly paralyzed in my corner, resorting to my old, reliable strategy of scribbling when unsure of how to respond to Sanjit, Sanjit appended his counsel with a dose of silence – one reminiscent to that of a few days prior. The students looked upward and downward, fans to notes to pens to toes, outward and inward, peers to souls, and of course, toward the direction of the perceived elephant in the room, Sanjit’s books. Simultaneously, Sanjit confidently and patiently searched among the students before finding my eyes; once connected, the lesson moved forward.

One day I overheard Olmo ask him, “Why don’t you talk, Prince Aleksey?” The cop tore a piece of paper from his journal, scribbled something, and handed my brother the note. Olmo grinned and regarded Aleksey with admiring eyes. “Cool!” Olmo showed me the note later. Only four words: I don’t want to.

I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this ... I still love scribbling the word - WRITER - any time on a form, questionnaire, document asks for my occupation. Fine, I write personality quizzes, I don't write about the Great Issues of the Day, but I think it's fair to say I am a writer ... ('Adopted-orphan smile', I mean, that's not bad, come on.)

If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich...

It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless.

Sometimes, when it’s going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.

It was a weird way to get to know Leon, writing all these notes over the last few months, and it sort of happened without me noticing - one minute I was scribbling him a quick note about leftovers, the next I was in a full-on, day-to-day correspondence.

I’ve become obsessed. I carry her notebook with me everywhere I go, spending all my free moments trying to decipher the words she’s scribbled in the margins, developing stories to go along with the numbers she’s written down. I’ve also noticed that the last page is missing. Ripped out. I can’t help but wonder why. I’ve searched through the book a hundred times, looking for other sections where pages might be gone, but I’ve found none. And somehow I feel cheated, knowing there’s a piece I might’ve missed. It’s not even my journal; it’s none of my business at all, but I’ve read her words so many times now that they feel like my own. I can practically recite them from memory. It’s strange being in her head without being able to see her. I feel like she’s here, right in front of me. I feel like I now know her so intimately, so privately. I’m safe in the company of her thoughts; I feel welcome, somehow. Understood. So much so that some days I manage to forget that she’s the one who put this bullet hole in my arm. I almost forget that she still hates me, despite how hard I’ve fallen for her. And I’ve fallen. So hard. I’ve hit the ground. Gone right through it.

I wrote every day throughout my twenties. For a while, I had a boyfriend who was a musician, and he practiced every day. He played scales; I wrote small fictional scenes. It was the same idea - to keep your hand in your craft, to stay close to it. On bad days, when I felt no inspiration at all, I would set the kitchen timer for thirty minutes and make myself sit there and scribble something, anything. I had read an interview with John Updike where he said that some of the best novels you've ever read were written in an hour a day; I figured I could always carve out at least thirty minutes somewhere to dedicate myself to my work, no matter what else was going on or how badly I believed the work was going.

Some people won't dog-ear the pages. Others won't place the book facedown, pages splayed. Some won't dare make a mark in the margin. Get over it. Books exist to impart their worlds to you, not to be beautiful objects to save for some other day. We implore you to fold, crack, and scribble on your books whenever the desire takes you. Underline the good bits, exclaim "YES!" and "NO!" in the margins. Invite others to inscribe and date the frontispiece. Draw pictures, jot down phone numbers and Web addresses, make journal entries, draft letters to friends or world leaders. Scribble down ideas for a novel of your own, sketch bridges you want to build, dresses you want to design. Stick postcards and pressed flowers between the pages. When next you open the book, you'll be able to find the bits that made you think, laugh, and cry the first time around. And you'll remember that you picked up that coffee stain in the cafe where you also picked up that handsome waiter. Favorite books should be naked, faded, torn, their pages spilling out. Love them like a friend, or at least a favorite toy. Let them wrinkle and age along with you.

He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater's guide to love. You think? I do. It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors. You celebrate Arlenny's Ph.D defense. And then one June night you scribble the ex's name and: The half-life of love is forever. You bust out a couple more things. Then you put your head down. The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don't want to burn them or give up writing forever. It's a start, you say to the room. That's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

During those days, both the bed and my little rickety table were swimming in notes and scribbled-over manuscripts that I took turns working on, adding new ideas that occurred to me in the course of the day, crossing out material or freshening up the dead passages with a lively word here or there, and pushing on from sentence to sentence with great labor.

So a scientist and an engineer are tossed into separate rooms, stocked with tools and parts, and told that they aren't allowed out until they've produced a working prototype for a radio receiver. After two days, the scientist has covered the walls in scribbling and looks like a mad man, raving about how not only is it impossible to build a receiver with the parts given but that he's proven that radio is theoretically impossible anyway. When they check on the engineer, they find that he'd built the receiver in less than a day, fashioned a crude speaker and antenna, and had found a radio broadcast he liked and hadn't bothered to tell them he'd finished.

It should not be physically possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible.

Oh, how clearly I see your faults! Such distinctly highlighted flaws; it's as if the sun and moon mean to keep them illuminated in my eyes. My mind is quick to spell out a simple remedy for those defects. But alas, poor me! My own faults―which I only assume to have because all do―are blurred and obscured by a mental fog. I've no eyes with which to gaze back at myself. The sun and moon refuse their illumination, and my mind offers no sure elixir but a complex recipe scribbled in foreign words I scarcely comprehend.

SAPPHIRE AND DIAMONDS When I look up at Heaven, I see the souls of those who died Beaming down at me, Wanting to scream: “I'm still alive!”, Wishing to scribble across the sapphire sky - Letters to their loved ones, But a million dark oceans stand between us, Between those who passed and the living, Between those of us still stuck below, And those who have crossed over the threshold of time - Where what seems like eternity Is really only a few minutes. So you see, there is no reason to weep over the shining ones - For even though the space that separates us is limitless, The wall of time that divides us is only paper-thin. And one day, we shall all reunite with them, When our souls are released like fish Back into the vast shimmering sea To shine together like Glittering diamonds.

It dawns on me that maybe I'm just terrifically lazy; that I might be appropriating other people’s invisible sicknesses and disorders and scribbling them on the clipboard at the end of my bed to fool the nurses; so I can indulge in rest cures all day, every day. That I’m even fooling myself.

Dr. Bone Specialist came in, made me stand up and hobble across the room, checked my reflexes, and then made me lie down on the table. He bent my right knee this way and that, up and down, all the way out to the side and in. Then he did the same with my left leg. He ordered X rays then started to leave the room. I panicked. I MUST GET DRUGS. "What can I take for the pain?" I asked him before he got out the door. "You can take some over the counter ibuprofen," he suggested. "But I wouldn't take more than nine a day." I choked. Nine a day? I'd been popping forty. Nine a day? Like hell. I couldn't even go to the bathroom on my own, I hadn't slept in three weeks, and my normally sunny cheery disposition had turned into that of a very rabid dog. If I didn't get good drugs and get them now, it was straight to Shooter's World and then Walgreens pharmacy for me. "I don't think you understand," I explained. "I can't go to work. I have spent the last four days with my mother who is addicted to QVC, watching jewelry shows, doll shows and make-up shows. I almost ordered a beef-jerky maker! Give me something, or I'm going to use your calf muscles to make the first batch!" Without further ado, he hastily scribbled out a prescription for some codeine and was gone. I was happy. My mother, however, had lost the ability to speak.

I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life — that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry. I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong. Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding. Other words that come to mind: faith, grace, rest. In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change — there’s never been a day that my friends haven’t been able to say, and at a distance, “There’s Oliver, still standing around in the weeds. There she is, still scribbling in her notebook.” But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel. Restless. I read about ideas. Yet I let them remain ideas. I read about the poet who threw his books away, the better to come to a spiritual completion. Yet I keep my books. I flutter; I am attentive, maybe I even rise a little, balancing; then I fall back.

It should not be possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips.... p 72

You’ve made it impossible for me to read a book in peace. When you’re not here, I just gaze at the words until they tumble off the page into a puddle in my lap. Instead of reading, I sit there and review the hours of the day I spent in your company, and I am more charmed by that story than anything the author has scribbled down. I have never been lonely in my life, but you have made me lonely. When you are gone, I am a moping ruin. I thought I understood the world fairly well. But you have made it all mysterious again. And it’s unnerving and frightening and wonderful, and I want it to continue. I want all your mysteries.

Theories look great on paper until reality scribbles all over the page.

He’s crying a little now, from the shock and the shame and the fear and the humiliation and the pain. Tunde recognizes those feelings; he’s known them since the first day Enuma touched him. He has written in the scribbled notes for his book: “At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second.

Taking us by and large, we're a queer lot We women who write poetry. And when you think How few of us there've been, it's queerer still. I wonder what it is that makes us do it, Singles us out to scribble down, man-wise, The fragments of ourselves. Why are we Already mother-creatures, double-bearing, With matrices in body and in brain? I rather think that there is just the reason We are so sparse a kind of human being; The strength of forty thousand Atlases Is needed for our every-day concerns. There's Sapho, now I wonder what was Sapho. I know a single slender thing about her: That, loving, she was like a burning birch-tree All tall and glittering fire, and that she wrote Like the same fire caught up to Heaven and held there, A frozen blaze before it broke and fell. Ah, me! I wish I could have talked to Sapho, Surprised her reticences by flinging mine Into the wind. This tossing off of garments Which cloud the soul is none too easy doing With us to-day. But still I think with Sapho One might accomplish it, were she in the mood to bare her loveliness of words and tell The reasons, as she possibly conceived them of why they are so lovely. Just to know How she came at them, just watch The crisp sea sunshine playing on her hair, And listen, thinking all the while 'twas she Who spoke and that we two were sisters Of a strange, isolated little family. And she is Sapho -- Sapho -- not Miss or Mrs., A leaping fire we call so for convenience....

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4. Be in love with yr life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time 15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it 26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You're a Genius all the time 30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

We didn’t write it at the time. We took notes, as journalists did in those days, by committing quotes to memory, then making our excuses and heading for the bathroom, where we’d scribble into our notebooks before the booze set in.

There are three things that make me want to drink: difficult times, when I want alcohol to either alleviate the pain or allow me to feel it; clear days that make me want to scribble all over the irritating blue sky; and well, waking up in the morning.

One of the world’s most fascinating mysteries is surely the Tamam Shud case. In December 1948, an unidentified man was found dead on a beach in Adelaide. The only clue to a possible identity was a tiny piece of paper found in a hidden pocket sewn into the trousers of the dead man with the words ‘Tamam Shud’ scribbled on it. The phrase is used on the last page of a collection of poems of Omar Khayyam called The Rubaiyat, a copy of which was found with a scribbled code in it, which was believed to have been written in there by the dead man. What does the code mean? What was it leading him to? Why and how did he die? All of these questions remain completely unanswered to this day and the case is as much of a mystery now as it was the very day the body was discovered.

Some of us fall through the unseen cracks in the world of health on a bright summer’s day through a run-in with machine or microbe, like Alice down the rabbit hole. Some of us were born this way. And some find out that our genes have hidden within them a ticking time bomb. Waiting. Silently. However we got here, we are now inhabitants of the state of sickness. Our papers for the world of health have been rescinded without notice. Our body-world has been colonised by patriarchs, and we, the natives, should know our place: small folded patient, compliant, silent, not defiant. They seem to believe that our bodies are just an errant version of theirs. That our souls are not woman-shaped on the inside. That it’s not our place to take our space and insist on our inner difference. Their gospel is scribbled down on prescription pads in spider scrawl. They are not to be questioned, especially not with our own heresy.

From the first day we met, I knew I needed you in my life. You took the chaos and made it calm. You lifted my heart with your smile and awed me with your brilliant mind. I kept every secret valentine, every scribbled note, your stuffed rabbit, and the answer to every math question I gave you. I hoped one day to be the kind of man you could love, a man who would hold and cherish you, a man worthy of you, and who would protect you with the sword you are going to allow him to have at our wedding.

Patton inspected the cargo with the possessive eye of a man who intended to use every last bullet, bomb, and basketball shoe. When he asked a young quartermaster captain how the loading was proceeding, the officer replied, “I don’t know, but my trucks are getting on all right.” Patton took a moment to scribble in his diary: “That is the answer. If everyone does his part, these seemingly impossible tasks get done. When I think of the greatness of my job and realize that I am what I am, I am amazed, but on reflection, who is as good as I am? I know of no one.” It was a fair self-assessment by a man who had spent the past four decades preparing for this moment,

Today was a day for sailing and drinking, for bobbing out under the blazing sun until the sky flipped over into dark and the fireworks were sent scribbling out over all of it.

Writing is how I process the cacophony of each day. Prayer is how God makes sense out of my scribbles.

For the biographer, the final clue to character lies in the yet unread - the scribbled note, the diary page, a notation in the margin of a draft - until the day when even the most devoted portraitist of the dead says, "Enough!" Working in the service of the dead, biographers quit their labors only when the sole remaining task is the impossible - resurrection.

This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences—nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.” At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.

He translates one book of the Iliad, two of the Odyssey, plus an admirable slice of Plato’s Republic. Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one, scribbled onto yellow legal pads in his crimped pencil-writing and stuffed into boxes beneath the dining table. Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they’re terrible. He shows them to no one.

When I look up at Heaven, I see the souls of those who died Beaming down at me, Wanting to scream: “I'm still alive!”, Wishing to scribble across the sapphire sky - Letters to their loved ones, But a million dark oceans stand between us, Between those who passed and the living, Between those of us still stuck below, And those who have crossed over the threshold of time - Where what seems like eternity to us, Is really only a few minutes to them. So you see, there is no reason to weep over the shining ones - For even though the space that separates us is limitless, The wall of time that divides us is only paper-thin. And one day, we shall all reunite with them, When our souls are released like fish Back into the vast shimmering sea To shine together like Glittering diamonds.

One day the rotting remains of their libraries will disintegrate so completely that they will be indistinguishable from the world’s wrack of stray eddies and meaningless scribbles, the untide of heat death. The

It’s like I have this demon inside of me, and I want it gone, but the idea of removing it via pill is . . . I don’t know . . . weird. But a lot of days I get over that, because I do really hate the demon.” “You often try to understand your experience through metaphor, Aza: It’s like a demon inside of you; you’ll call your consciousness a bus, or a prison cell, or a spiral, or a whirlpool, or a loop, or a—I think you once called it a scribbled circle, which I found interesting.” “Yeah,” I said. “One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.” She turned to her computer, shook her mouse to wake it up, and then clicked an image on her desktop. “I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.

To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play round a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy. To write is to sit and stare, hypnotized, at the reflection of the window in the silver ink-stand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one's cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then the orgy of inspiration from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed and ladened with treasures that one unloads slowly on to the virgin page in the little round pool of light under the lamp. To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it — and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower. To write is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and to describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double-pointed jib, the many-hued, fugitive, thrilling adjective.… The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar.

And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings –– by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.

Apathetic to my pity party, God interrupted in a thunderous Voice with the words, “For we walk by faith, not by sight!” 2 Corinthians 5: 7 resounded in my head as I scribbled it down and smacked it up on my wall. There, I thought. Now it’s up on my wall where I have to look at it every day.

all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live. Besides, somewhere in the basement of The Jolly Corner to this day, mildewing amidst the pages of an equally mildewed paperback, is a 3-x-5 card on which I had scribbled this quote from Flaubert: Books aren’t made the way babies are: they are made like pyramids. There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there on the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and the bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison. I was eight when I jotted down that quote, but even then, the part I enjoyed the most was the delightful “Continue this comparison.” And even then, I understood at once that the pissing jackals were critics.

On the morning of November 22nd, a Friday, it became clear the gap between living and dying was closing. Realizing that Aldous [Huxley] might not survive the day, Laura [Huxley's wife] sent a telegram to his son, Matthew, urging him to come at once. At ten in the morning, an almost inaudible Aldous asked for paper and scribbled "If I go" and then some directions about his will. It was his first admission that he might die ... Around noon he asked for a pad of paper and scribbled LSD-try it intermuscular 100mm In a letter circulated to Aldous's friends, Laura Huxley described what followed: 'You know very well the uneasiness in the medical mind about this drug. But no 'authority', not even an army of authorities, could have stopped me then. I went into Aldous's room with the vial of LSD and prepared a syringe. The doctor asked me if I wanted him to give the shot- maybe because he saw that my hands were trembling. His asking me that made me conscious of my hands, and I said, 'No, I must do this.' An hour later she gave Huxley a second 100mm. Then she began to talk, bending close to his ear, whispering, 'light and free you let go, darling; forward and up. You are going forward and up; you are going toward the light. Willingly and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing this beautifully — you are going toward the light — you are going toward a greater love … You are going toward Maria's [Huxley's first wife, who had died many years earlier] love with my love. You are going toward a greater love than you have ever known. You are going toward the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it so beautifully.' All struggle ceased. The breathing became slower and slower and slower until, 'like a piece of music just finishing so gently in sempre piu piano, dolcamente,' at twenty past five in the afternoon, Aldous Huxley died.

When today Oskar, lying or sitting in his hospital bed but in either case drumming, revisits Arsenal Passage and the Stockturm with the scribbles on its dungeon walls and its well-oiled instruments of torture, when once again he looks down on those three windows outside the lobby of the Stadt-Theater and thereafter returns to Arsenal Passage and Sigismund Markus' store, searching for the particulars of a day in September, he cannot help looking for Poland at the same time. How does he look for it? With his drumsticks. Does he also look for Poland with his soul? He looks for it with every organ of his being, but the soul is not an organ. I look for the land of the Poles that is lost to the Germans, for the moment at least. Nowadays the Germans have started searching for Poland with credits, Leicas, and compasses, with radar, divining rods, delegations, and moth-eaten provincial students' associations in costume. Some carry Chopin in their hearts, others thoughts of revenge. Condemning the first four partitions of Poland, they are busily planning a fifth; in the meantime flying to Warsaw via Air France in order to deposit, with appropriate remorse, a wreath on the spot that was once the ghetto. One of these days they will go searching for Poland with rockets. I, meanwhile, conjure up Poland on my drum. And this is what I drum: Poland's lost, but not forever, all's lost, but not forever, Poland's not lost forever.

You were born to author your own story. This includes editing the bad parts. Go back. Repent. Climb where you fell. Joy where you sorrowed. Mend what you tore. Heal where you harmed. Speak where you were silent. Sing and laugh and dance where life once snatched your pen and scribbled black, ugly marks in your book. Buy new ink and print beautiful poetry over all the ugly parts.

But creativity, she doesn’t fit in a box. She’s a wild, fluid, uncontrollable energy that spreads out sensuously from a curious, wide open mind in large expanses of aimless time on dreamy liminal train journeys or in subtle moments between waking and sleep. She can’t be pushed, or coughed up, or beaten into submission by a brutal and unmerciful regime. She needs light, and breath, and space and then, maybe, if the mood takes her, she’ll unfurl her wings and let her colors run into the atmosphere. And this energy, this wild, fun, unpredictable magic that I’d played with so happily as a child, that had flowed through me like it was my very life force up until this point; I didn’t understand it anymore. Creativity was this swirling wild mysterious language, but now I lived in a colorless angular world that promised me a certainty I valued above all else. And where before, I was just scribbling, writing, moving for the mere joy of it, now I tried to commodify my creativity. I tried to squeeze it out and make it do something worthwhile, be special, be important, be good. I could no longer see the point of art if it wasn’t good. But that’s the tricky thing about art, it’s never strictly good or bad, it’s just expression, or excretion. It couldn’t be measure by scales or charts, or contained in small manageable segments in the day. It was always, by its very nature, so imperfect. And the imperfections drove me mad. The anxiety and frustration with my creative endeavors turned into an actual fear of blank pages and pallets of paint. There was too much potential and too much room to fail so day by day, I chose perfection over creativity. I chose no more creativity, and no more mistakes. There are things that eating disorders takes from you that are more important, much greater and more profound a loss, and much much more difficult to recover and restore completely than body fat. And that reckless urge to create, just for the pure, senseless joy of it, would become the one I missed the most.

I tried picturing all those places on that map of BeeCee. That’s what we call our country now, just letters of its real name what most people have forgot or don’t care to remember. The map said that old name behind all the scribblings, all the new borders and territories my nana drawn on, but I could only read letters then, not whole words. All I know is that one day all the maps became useless and we had to make our own. The old’uns called that day the Fall or the Reformation. Nana said some down in the far south called it Rapture. Nana was a babe when it happened, said her momma called it the Big Damn Stupid. Set everything back to zero. I never asked why, never much cared. Life is life and you got to live it in the here- now not the back- then. And the here- now for little me was the Thick Woods, with night coming fast.

Oh,” said Ron, his smile fading slightly. “Are you that bad at kissing?” “Dunno,” said Harry, who hadn’t considered this, and immediately felt rather worried. “Maybe I am.” “Of course you’re not,” said Hermione absently, still scribbling away at her letter. “How do you know?” said Ron in a sharp voice. “Because Cho spends half her time crying these days,” said Hermione vaguely. “She does it at mealtimes, in the loos, all over the place.

-and noticing, more each day, the countless deaths that occur around you- of other people, of animals, of insects, of the sick and infirm, of accident victims, of plants ripped from the earth and worms crushed beneath the blades of plows- of authors in their rooms, scribbling out desperate words in the backs of books no one will ever read- even the shattering of molecular bonds, the disintegration of atomic structures, happening every moment, millions each nanosecond, everywhere-

Were you ever in France, Mr. Martin?" said Candide. "Yes," said Martin, "I have been in several provinces. In some one-half of the people are fools, in others they are too cunning; in some they are weak and simple, in others they affect to be witty; in all, the principal occupation is love, the next is slander, and the third is talking nonsense." "But, Mr. Martin, have you seen Paris?" "Yes, I have. All these kinds are found there. It is a chaos—a confused multitude, where everybody seeks pleasure and scarcely any one finds it, at least as it appeared to me. I made a short stay there. On my arrival I was robbed of all I had by pickpockets at the fair of St. Germain. I myself was taken for a robber and was imprisoned for eight days, after which I served as corrector of the press to gain the money necessary for my return to Holland on foot. I knew the whole scribbling rabble, the party rabble, the fanatic rabble. It is said that there are very polite people in that city, and I wish to believe it.

We do not lack devices for measuring these miserable days of ours, in which it should be our pleasure that they be not frittered away without leaving behind any memory of ourselves in the mind of men.”46 He began scribbling the same phrase over and over again, every time he needed to try a new pen nib or to fritter away a moment: “Tell me if anything was ever done . . . Tell me . . . Tell me.”47 And at one point he jotted a cry of anguish: “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

Then a thought hit me like a ton of slag. Arlene wouldn’t bother taking time in this hellhole to scribble her mark unless she had a damned good reason. Not just to point out the sphere—if she knew it was there, she’d have used it herself like a good soldier. The only logical conclusion was that the arrow pointed the way out of the nuclear plant—the way Arlene Sanders had already gone. Like Arne Saknussen, she marked her own trail for all who followed. So why hadn’t I found it? Same way Arlene missed the patio door: there had to be another hidden door nearby that I had missed. Third time’s the charm. The damned door couldn’t have been more than five feet from the one I had found. One good push and it was open, leading to a beautiful piece of straight, well-lit corridor that reached its end with a clean, massive metal door that had printed on it the welcome letters EXIT—obviously a holdover from the plant’s mundane days as a hangout for humans. Feeling bold and unstoppable, I walked right up to that door and discovered that it required a computer key card before it would bless the lonely traveler with an open sesame. Great. Now I could be miserable again.

There are three kinds of book owners. The first has all the standard sets and best-sellers—unread, untouched. (This deluded individual owns wood-pulp and ink, not books.) The second has a great many books—a few of them read through, most of them dipped into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they were bought. (This person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false respect for their physical appearance.) The third has a few books or many—every one of them dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. (This man owns books.)

Once I had found the courage to tell Rebecca about the children in my head, it wasn't so hard in the coming months to tell Roberta. On the train from Huddersfield one day in May I made a roll call of the usual suspects: Baby Alice; Alice 2, who was two years old and liked to suck sticky lollipops; Billy; Samuel; Shirley; Kato; and the enigmatic Eliza. There was boy I would grow particularly fond of named limbo, who was ten, but like Eliza he was still forming. There were others without names or specific behaviour traits. I didn't want to confuse the issue with this crowd of 'others' and just counted off the major players with their names, ages and personalities, which Roberta scribbled down on a pad. Then she looked slightly embarrassed. 'You know, I've met Billy on a few occasions, and Samuel once too,' she said. 'You're joking.' I felt betrayed. 'Why didn't you tell me?' 'I wanted it to come from you, Alice, when you were ready.' For some reason I pulled up my sleeves and showed he my arms. 'That's Kato,' I said, 'or Shirley.' She looked a bit pale as she studied the scars. I had feeling she didn't know what to say. The problem with counsellors is that they are trained to listen, not to give advice or diagnosis. We sat there with my arms extended over the void between us like evidence in court, then I pushed down my sleeves again. 'I'm so sorry, Alice,' she said finally and I shrugged. 'It's not your fault, is it?' Now she shrugged, and we were quiet once more.

Once upon a time There was a friend Who poured some ink To a pen, which had been dried up Since then There are pages, and books Cluttered by scribbling With or without a meaning When the ink was done Scribbling started In the earth, dust covered In the tranquil grounds of the temple And in the naked skies Among floating clouds Mesmerized by the dawn of love On top of mountains Like a fairy spreading her wings On fluttering wings of butterflies In paths, under the starry skies On piano keys, playing without a tune On sprays of vibrant blooms Even without a sweet fragrance Even among the debris, pungent flowing down the drain Among the eyes filled with emptiness Walking down the streets, In the battle field, drenched with blood Waiting for a flying bullet, which brings death…. There is a poem Each and every moment Each and every day! (Translated by Manel K R Fernando)

It was the biggest joint summoning that I’d been involved in since the great days of Prague. Forty djinn materializing more or less at once, in a vast chamber built for that purpose in the bowels of Whitehall. As with all such things, it was a messy business, despite the best efforts of the magicians. They were all lined up in tidy rows of identical pentacles, wearing the same dark suits and speaking their incantations quietly, while the officiating clerks scribbled their names down at tables to the sides. We djinn, of course, were less concerned with regimental decorum: we arrived in forty very different guises, trumpeting our individuality with horns, tails, iridescent flanges, spikes, and tentacles; with colors ranging from obsidian-black to delicate dandelion-yellow; with a menagerie full of hollerings and chitter; with a magnificent range of sulfurous guffs and stenches.

I'm not satisfied with the way in which people in the party usually write articles. They are all so conventional, so wooden, so cut-and-dry.... Our scribblings are usually not lyrics, but whirrings, without color or resonance, like the tone of an engine wheel. I believe that the cause lies in the fact that when people write, they forget for the most part to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the whole import and truth of what they are writing. I believe that ever time, every day, in every article you must live through the thing again, you must feel your way tugh it, and then fresh words-coming fom: the heart and going to the heartwould occur to express the old fmiliar thing. But you get so used to a truth that you rattle off the deepest and greatest tings as if they were the "Our Fater" I firmly intend, when I write, never to forget to be enthusiastic about what I write and to commune with myself.

Senlin cleared his throat and furrowed his brow. "Marya, I... I have a difficult time expressing certain... genuinely held feelings. I..." he swallowed and shook his head. This was not how he wanted the speech to go. She waited patiently, and he gathered his thoughts. "You've made it impossible for me to read a book in peace. When you're not here, I just gaze at the words until they tumble off the page into a puddle in my lap. Instead of reading, I sit there and review the hours of the day I spent in your company, and I am more charmed by that story than anything the author has scribbled down. I have never been lonely in my life, but you have made me lonely. When you are gone, I am a moping ruin. I thought I understood the world fairly well. But you have made it all mysterious again. And it's unnerving and frightening and wonderful, and I want it to continue. I want all your mysteries. And if I could, I would give you a hundred pianos. I would...

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

...[T]hough the whole point of his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Covey.” He puts his hands on my waist and picks me up for a hug like I weigh nothing. Setting me down, he says, “Can we kiss in public since it’s a holiday?” “Where’s my valentine first?” I say, holding my hand out. Peter laughs. “Damn, it’s in my backpack. Geez. So greedy.” Whatever it is, I can tell he is excited to give it to me, which in turn excites me. He takes my hand and leads me over to the table where his backpack is. “First sit down,” he says, and I obey. He sits down next to me. “Close your eyes and hold out your hand.” I do, and I hear him unzip his bag, and then he puts something in my hand, a piece of paper. I open my eyes. “It’s a poem,” he says. “For you.” The moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of beautiful Lara Jean. And stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of beautiful Lara Jean. I touch my hand to my lips. Beautiful Lara Jean! I can’t even believe it. “This is my favorite thing anyone has ever done for me. I could squeeze you to death right now I’m so happy.” To picture him, sitting at his desk at home, scribbling away with a pen and paper, endears him to me so completely. It gives me shivers. Currents of electricity from my scalp down to my toes. “Really? You like it?” “I love it!” I throw my arms around him and squeeze with all my might. I will put this valentine in my hatbox, and when I’m old like Stormy, I will take it out and look at it and remember this exact moment. Forget Genevieve; forget everything. Peter Kavinsky wrote me a poem.

The plot of Love on a Mortal Lease is not unlike those Shakespear would use later, nor unlike those of commonplace Victorian works. The heroine, Rachel Gwynne, has dead parents, as is the case from Oliver Twist (1837) through hundreds of other ensuing tripledeckers. Rachel is a novelist – most of Shakespear’s heroines would be writers – in love with a military man many years her senior. After he refuses to marry her because he fears his mother will dislike Rachel and therefore disinherit him, Rachel becomes his mistress. Once the snobby old mother meets Rachel by happenstance in London, however, they immediately adore each other, and the Colonel may now safely marry Rachel – though she doesn’t love him anymore, and he seems none too fond of her, either. They muddle along in unhappy matrimony until Rachel conveniently discovers (as we’ve known for a while) that the Colonel has had another longtime mistress, a stupid society girl, throughout the course of their marriage, and even during their preceding affair. When the Colonel even more conveniently falls on his head and dies, Rachel is made a wealthy widow in her mid-twenties, free to marry a nice young writer who knows about, but forgives her, her former relationship. A happily wish-fulfilling story, perhaps, for a young woman writer in a bad marriage, and Rachel has some interesting ideas about her profession: speaking of clever girls who scribble, she hopes for the day that “the cleverness and the scribbling . . . fall from her, like a disguise, and she stands revealed in her true form – then she may never write another word, or she may write something immortal.”8

She remembered those fancy receipt books written by Lady Nonesuch, or Countess Thingumabob, and laughed out loud. They boasted how damnable high bred the lady was, and how the reader might herself be reckoned à la mode, if she could only cook such stuff herself. No, her book would hold a dark mirror to such conceits. Since Mother Eve's day, women had whispered of herblore and crafty potions, the wise woman's weapons against the injustices of life; a life of ill treatment, the life of a dog. If women were to be kicked into the kitchen they might play it to their advantage, for what was a kitchen but a witch's brewhouse? Men had no notion of what women whispered to each other, hugger-mugger by the chimney corner; of treaclish syrups and bitter pods, of fat black berries and bulbous roots. Such remedies were rarely scribbled on paper; they were carried in noses, fingertips and stealthy tongues. Methods were shared in secret, of how to make a body hot with lust or shiver with fever, or to doze for a stretch or to sleep for eternity. Like a chorus the hungry ghosts started up around her: voices that croaked and cackled and damned their captors headlong into hell. Her ghosts were the women who had sailed out beside her to Botany Bay, nearly five years back on the convict ship Experiment. She made a start with that most innocent of dishes: Brinny's best receipt for Apple Pie. For there was magic in even that- the taking of uneatables: sour apples, claggy fat, dusty flour- and their abradabrification into a crisp-lidded, syrupy miracle. Mother Eve's Secrets, she titled her book, a collection of best receipts and treacherous remedies.

We cannot provide a definition of those products from which the age takes it name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. The cleverer writers poked fun at their own work. Many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. It is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out. Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. Thousands upon thousands spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phaeacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

what I knew that morning in March 1977 as we settled around the conference table. I wasn’t even sure how these guys reached us, or how they’d arranged this meeting. “Okay, fellas,” I said, “what’ve you got?” It was a beautiful day, I remember. The light outside the room was a buttery pale yellow, and the sky was blue for the first time in months, so I was distracted, a little spring feverish, as Rudy leaned his weight on the edge of the conference table and smiled. “Mr. Knight, we’ve come up with a way to inject . . . air . . . into a running shoe.” I frowned and dropped my pencil. “Why?” I said. “For greater cushioning,” he said. “For greater support. For the ride of a lifetime.” I stared. “You’re kidding me, right?” I’d heard a lot of silliness from a lot of different people in the shoe business, but this. Oh. Brother. Rudy handed me a pair of soles that looked as if they’d been teleported from the twenty-second century. Big, clunky, they were clear thick plastic and inside were—bubbles? I turned them over. “Bubbles?” I said. “Pressurized air bags,” he said. I set down the soles and gave Rudy a closer look, a full head-to-toe. Six-three, lanky, with unruly dark hair, bottle-bottom glasses, a lopsided grin, and a severe vitamin D deficiency, I thought. Not enough sunshine. Or else a long-lost member of the Addams Family. He saw me appraising him, saw my skepticism, and wasn’t the least fazed. He walked to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and began writing numbers, symbols, equations. He explained at some length why an air shoe would work, why it would never go flat, why it was the Next Big Thing. When he finished I stared at the blackboard. As a trained accountant I’d spent a good part of my life looking at blackboards, but this Rudy fella’s scribbles were something else. Indecipherable.

I GOT A PHONE CALL ONE DAY FROM A FRIEND WHO HAD RECENTLY opened an Indian jewelry store in Arizona. She was giddy with a curious piece of news. Something fascinating had just happened, and she thought that, as a psychologist, I might be able to explain it to her. The story involved a certain allotment of turquoise jewelry she had been having trouble selling. It was the peak of the tourist season, the store was unusually full of customers, the turquoise pieces were of good quality for the prices she was asking; yet they had not sold. My friend had attempted a couple of standard sales tricks to get them moving. She tried calling attention to them by shifting their location to a more central display area; no luck. She even told her sales staff to "push" the items hard, again without success. Finally, the night before leaving on an out-of-town buying trip, she scribbled an exasperated note to her head saleswoman, "Everything in this display case, price x %," hoping just to be rid of the offending pieces, even if at a loss. When she returned a few days later, she was not surprised to find that every article had been sold. She was shocked, though, to discover that, because the employee had read the "%" in her scrawled message as a "2," the entire allotment had sold out at twice the original price! That's

I find it helpful to take a piece of paper and a pencil and simply write down a ‘what’s on my mind’ list, addressing any thoughts I have and anything that has worried or concerned me during that day. It’s not my actual ‘to-do list’, which is safely saved on my calendar in the cloud, but something more personal. If a particular piece of business has been playing on my mind, I might write down a note to call the client in the morning; if a birthday of a loved one or something like Mother’s Day is on the horizon, I could draw a bunch of flowers as a reminder. I’m just scribbling on the page, even doodling at times, in a very relaxed, informal process that you could do at any spare moment before going to bed. I will then leave my piece of paper next to my house keys – or anything I never leave home without – for the next morning, so I won’t forget it. Putting it all down on paper means that I go to bed feeling that I have consciously addressed the issue for now, and I can trust the work that goes on in my sleeping brain to take care of it overnight.

Well,” Chris Creeper sighed, “creepers used to be humans. We were once just people who were skilled in working with gunpowder. When the players came, we were all peaceful at first. We traded our gunpowder with them. Then, one day, the players grew greedy. They wanted our gunpowder for themselves. They captured us and experimented on us. When they were done, there were none of us left as humans. We had all become these green monsters. Now we are cursed to walk this earth this way forever.” Steve was speechless for a moment as he absorbed this information and quickly scribbled it down. He quickly thought of another question. “Um, so, why do you explode?” “Because we anger very easily,” replied Chris Creeper. “Part of the curse.” “So, if I anger you...” started Steve. The creeper began to hiss and expand. “Never mind!” said Steve. “Thanks for the interview! See you around!

The first thing I do is take a final look at my e-mail inbox to ensure that there’s nothing requiring an urgent response before the day ends. The next thing I do is transfer any new tasks that are on my mind or were scribbled down earlier in the day into my official task lists. (I use Google Docs for storing my task lists, as I like the ability to access them from any computer—but the technology here isn’t really relevant.) Once I have these task lists open, I quickly skim every task in every list, and then look at the next few days on my calendar. These two actions ensure that there’s nothing urgent I’m forgetting or any important deadlines or appointments sneaking up on me. I have, at this point, reviewed everything that’s on my professional plate. To end the ritual, I use this information to make a rough plan for the next day. Once the plan is created, I say, “Shutdown complete,” and my work thoughts are done for the day.

p2 I'd seen a photo of the actual red and white checked notebook that was Anne [Frank]'s first diary. I longed to own a similar notebook. Stationery was pretty dire back in the late fifties and early sixties. There was no such thing as Paperchase. I walked round and round the stationery counter in Woolworths and spent most of my pocket money on notebooks, but they weren't strong on variety. You could have shiny red sixpenny notebooks, lined inside, with strange maths details about rods and poles and perches on the back. (I never found out what they were!) Then you could have shiny blue sixpenny notebooks. That was your lot. I was enchanted to read in Dodie Smith's novel I Capture The Castle that the heroine, Cassandra, was writing her diary in a similar sixpenny notebook. She eventually progressed to a shilling notebook. My Woolworths rarely stocked such expensive luxuries. Then, two thirds of the way through the book, Cassandra is given a two-guinea red leather manuscript book. I lusted after that fictional notebook for years. I told my mother, Biddy. She rolled her eyes. It could have cost two hundred guineas - both were way out of our league... My dad, Harry, was a civil servant. One of the few perks of his job was that he had an unlimited illegal supply of notepads watermarked SO - Stationery Office. I'd drawn on these pads for years, I'd scribbled stories, I'd written letters. They were serviceable but unexciting: thin cream paper unreliably bound with glue at the top. You couldn't write a journal with these notepads; it would fall apart in days... My spelling wasn't too hot. It still isn't. Thank goodness for the spellcheck on my computer!

At first, roll calls were still taken. But, as death and sickness gained the upper hand, as more and more half-dead and corpses, especially children's corpses, were flung into the ditches, this keeping of lists seemed highly onerous, and the onbashi relinquished superfluous scribbling. Who cared to know that Sarkis, Astik, or Hapeth, that Anush, Vartuhi, or Koren, were rotting somewhere in the open? These saptiehs were not all brutes. It is even probable that most of them were good, plain, middling sort of people. But what can a saptieh do? He is under stringent orders to reach such and such a point with his whole convoy by such and such a scheduled hour. His heart may be in perfect sympathy with the screaming mother who tries to snatch her child out of a ditch, flings herself down on the road, and claws the earth. No use to talk to her. She's wasted minutes already, and it's still six miles to the next halt. A convoy held up. All the faces in it twisted with hate. A mad scream from a thousand throats. Why did not these crowds, weak as they were, hurl themselves on the saptieh and his mates, disarm them, and tear them into shreds? Perhaps the policemen were in constant terror of such assault, which would have finished them. And so -- one of them fires a shot. The rest whip out their swords to beat the defenceless cruelly with the blades. Thirty or forty men and women lie bleeding. And, with this blood, another emotion comes to life in the excited saptiehs -- their old itch for the women of the accursed race. In these helpless women you possess more than a human being -- in very truth you possess the God of your enemy. Afterwards, the saptiehs scarcely know how it all had happened.

In Waffen-SS units especially, the excitement and impatience were clearly intense. A member of the 12th SS Panzer-Division Hitler Jugend wrote to his sister on the eve of battle. ‘Dear Ruth, My daily letter will be very short today – short and sweet. I write during one of the great hours before an attack – full of unrest, full of expectation for what the next days will bring. Everyone who has been here the last two days and nights (especially nights), who has witnessed hour after hour the assembly of our crack divisions, who has heard the constant rattling of Panzers, knows that something is up and we are looking forward to a clear order to reduce the tension. We are still in the dark as to “where” and “how” but that cannot be helped! It is enough to know that we attack, and will throw the enemy from our homeland. That is a holy task!’ On the back of the sealed envelope he added a hurried postscript: ‘Ruth! Ruth! Ruth! WE MARCH!!!’ That must have been scribbled as they moved out, for the letter fell into American hands during the battle.

DURING THE RIDE back up to Telluride, among tablelands and cañons and red-rock debris, past the stone farmhouses and fruit orchards and Mormon spreads of the McElmo, below ruins haunted by an ancient people whose name no one knew, circular towers and cliffside towns abandoned centuries ago for reasons no one would speak of, Reef was able finally to think it through. If Webb had always been the Kieselguhr Kid, well, shouldn’t somebody ought to carry on the family business—you might say, become the Kid? It might’ve been the lack of sleep, the sheer relief of getting clear of Jeshimon, but Reef began to feel some new presence inside him, growing, inflating—gravid with what it seemed he must become, he found excuses to leave the trail now and then and set off a stick or two from the case of dynamite he had stolen from the stone powder-house at some mine. Each explosion was like the text of another sermon, preached in the voice of the thunder by some faceless but unrelenting desert prophesier who was coming more and more to ride herd on his thoughts. Now and then he creaked around in the saddle, as if seeking agreement or clarification from Webb’s blank eyes or the rictus of what would soon be a skull’s mouth. “Just getting cranked up,” he told Webb. “Expressing myself.” Back in Jeshimon he had thought that he could not bear this, but with each explosion, each night in his bedroll with the damaged and redolent corpse carefully unroped and laid on the ground beside him, he found it was easier, something he looked forward to all the alkaline day, more talk than he’d ever had with Webb alive, whistled over by the ghosts of Aztlán, entering a passage of austerity and discipline, as if undergoing down here in the world Webb’s change of status wherever he was now. . . . He had brought with him a dime novel, one of the Chums of Chance series, The Chums of Chance at the Ends of the Earth, and for a while each night he sat in the firelight and read to himself but soon found he was reading out loud to his father’s corpse, like a bedtime story, something to ease Webb’s passage into the dreamland of his death. Reef had had the book for years. He’d come across it, already dog-eared, scribbled in, torn and stained from a number of sources, including blood, while languishing in the county lockup at Socorro, New Mexico, on a charge of running a game of chance without a license. The cover showed an athletic young man (it seemed to be the fearless Lindsay Noseworth) hanging off a ballast line of an ascending airship of futuristic design, trading shots with a bestially rendered gang of Eskimos below. Reef began to read, and soon, whatever “soon” meant, became aware that he was reading in the dark, lights-out having occurred sometime, near as he could tell, between the North Cape and Franz Josef Land. As soon as he noticed the absence of light, of course, he could no longer see to read and, reluctantly, having marked his place, turned in for the night without considering any of this too odd. For the next couple of days he enjoyed a sort of dual existence, both in Socorro and at the Pole. Cellmates came and went, the Sheriff looked in from time to time, perplexed.

The Guiding Light is the longest-running serial in broadcast history. Still seen on CBS television, its roots go back almost 60 years, to radio’s pioneering soaps. Though its original characters have been swallowed and eclipsed by time, it still has faint ties to the show that was first simulcast July 20, 1952, and in time replaced its radio counterpart with a daily one-hour TV show. Its creator, Irna Phillips, was often called “the queen of soaps.” She was so influential in the field that she was compared with Frank and Anne Hummert, though the comparison was weak. While the Hummerts employed a huge stable of writers and turned out dozens of serials, Phillips wrote her own—two million words of it each year. Using a large month-by-month work chart, Phillips plotted up to half a dozen serials at once, dictating the action to a secretary. Mentally juggling the fates of scores of characters, she churned out quarter-hour slices of life in sessions filled with high drama, acting the parts and changing her voice for the various speaking roles, while secretaries scribbled the dialogue that flowed from her lips. She gave up teaching early in life to enter radio as an actress at Chicago’s WGN. She was 25 that year, 1930. In 1932 she began to write. She discovered that cliffhanger endings were surefire for bringing those early audiences back to their sets each day, but that slow and skillful character development was what kept the audience for years. She decided that the organ was the ideal musical instrument for those little shows and that the instrument should be played with pomp and power, with all the authority of a religious service in a great European cathedral. The music gave weight to the dialogue, which was usually focused and intense.

Yes, good point,” said Mrs. Weasley from the top of the table, where she sat, spectacles perched on the end of her nose, scanning an immense list of jobs that she had scribbled on a very long piece of parchment. “Now, Ron, have you cleaned out your room yet?” “Why?” exclaimed Ron, slamming his spoon down and glaring at his mother. “Why does my room have to be cleaned out? Harry and I are fine with it the way it is!” “We are holding your brother’s wedding here in a few days’ time, young man —” “And are they getting married in my bedroom?” asked Ron furiously. “No! So why in the name of Merlin’s saggy left —” “Don’t talk to your mother like that,” said Mr. Weasley firmly. “And do as you’re told.” Ron scowled at both his parents, then picked up his spoon and attacked the last few mouthfuls of his apple tart. “I can help, some of it’s my mess,” Harry told Ron, but Mrs. Weasley cut across him. “No, Harry, dear, I’d much rather you helped Arthur muck out the chickens, and Hermione, I’d be ever so grateful if you’d change the sheets for Monsieur and Madame Delacour; you know they’re arriving at eleven tomorrow morning.” But as it turned out, there was very little to do for the chickens.

Tenn believed that writers, all artists, had several homes. There was the biological place of birth; the home in which one grew up, bore witness, fell apart. There was also the place where the "epiphanies" began-a school, a church, perhaps a bed. Rockets were launched and an identity began to be set. There was the physical location where a writer sat each day and scribbled and hunted and pecked and dreamed and drank and cursed his way into a story or a play or a novel. Most importantly, however, there was the emotional, invisible, self-invented place where work began-what Tenn called his "mental theatre," a cerebral proscenium stage upon which his characters walked and stumbled and remained locked forever in his memory, ready, he felt, to be called into action and help him again.

But for all the colour of his character, his reputation was earned and maintained through his genius. There is a lovely story published in a 1965 issue of Life magazine that suggests just how highly respected he was. Henry Ford's fledgling car manufacturing company was once having trouble with one of the generators that powered the production line. They called Steinmetz in to consult on the problem and he solved it by lying down in the room where the generator was housed. For two days and nights he listened to its operation, scribbling calculations on a notepad. Eventually he got up, climbed up on the giant machine, and marked a point on the side with a chalk cross. He descended and told the engineers to replace sixteen of the generator's wire coils, the ones behind his chalk mark. They did what they were told, turned the generator back on, and discovered to their utter astonishment that it now worked perfectly. That story alone would be alone would be enough, but it gets better. From their headquarters in Schenectady, New York, General Electric sent forth a $10,000 dollar invoice for Steinmetz's services. Ford queried the astronomical sum, asking for a breakdown of the costs. Steinmetz replied personally. His itemized bill said, "Making chalk mark on generator: $1.00. Knowing where to make mark: $9,999.00" Apparently the bill was paid without further delay.

To love a country as if you’ve lost one: as if it were you on a plane departing from America forever, clouds closing like curtains on your country, the last scene in which you’re a madman scribbling the names of your favorite flowers, trees, and birds you’d never see again, your address and phone number you’d never use again, the color of your father’s eyes, your mother’s hair, terrified you could forget these. To love a country as if I was my mother last spring hobbling, insisting I help her climb all the way up to the U.S. Capitol, as if she were here before you today instead of me, explaining her tears, cheeks pink as the cherry blossoms coloring the air that day when she stopped, turned to me, and said: You know, mijo, it isn’t where you’re born that matters, it’s where you choose to die—that’s your country.

I asked, “How long will this take?” “About an hour, Niki.” Fi smiled at me. “About ten minutes.” Caitlin glared at Fi. “Depends. Cait might faff.” “I do not faff. What does that even mean?”  While Caitlin and Finn bickered, I grabbed the notebook from my bag and scribbled on it quickly.

Like most pain that we withhold from God’s touch, my paper pregnancy (apparently now also barren) had fostered a fermentation within my heart. My hurt was expanding beyond “just” the issues of childbearing and was touching the broader vision for my life. I was looking at life through the lens of being overlooked by God. I kept my eyes closed to keep the others around me from view — those whom, I naively assumed, could more easily proclaim the truths of God in song because they had what I wanted. Then I saw a vision on the back of my eyelids: the word family scribbled across a piece of paper. The paper had a nail through its center, affixing it to a cross. The Lord whispered inside my spirit as I saw it: If you never have a family, will you still love Me? I walked out of church that day, hardened. Had it really come to this? The very idea that what I most feared — becoming stamped with the word barren — was now not only a possibility but a suggestion . . . and from God?

I find that when I'm 'on the move' I invariably get inspired, even though I'm in no position to actually sit down and do any writing. So I take advantage of the inspiration, scribble down notes and/or bullet points, and then drop the template into my in-tray, ready for inclusion into my writing schedule for the following day.

January 27: Joe DiMaggio writes Marilyn a note on Hotel Lexington stationery: “A beautiful Saturday morning for New York, and no place to go, but to sit back on my desk and scribble you a note. Shouldn’t that be proof enough where my thoughts are? . . . You sound great on the phone. Keep yourself well!

Consider this: on the first day of creation, before God picked up the pen to scribble in stars and moon, sun and sky (and the sea monsters of the deep); the Lord God looked at the margins around and wondered what might come to life in those edges of existence. What we would see as void and empty, God saw as opportunity. Eugene Peterson, in The Message, describes it this way: “Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness” (Genesis 1:2).

Day had fucked up big time. This was all his fault, all because he couldn’t keep his nosy ass out of other peoples private business. Day rushed to God’s side. “I’ll help you ba—” Day didn’t know how, but God had found enough strength after that beating to push him so hard that he flew into the dresser, knocking it and all of the items that were on top of it to the floor, including the television. Day rolled a few feet, the dresser just missing falling on top of him. “Cash, what the fuck!” Day cursed. He rolled to his side and winced at the sharp pain in his ribs from coming into contact with the dresser. “I was trying to help you get into bed.” “Get the fuck out, Leo.” God’s face was an unyielding mask. For the first time in four long years, Day couldn’t read what the hell was going through God’s mind. Day stood slowly. “God, I only called him because I needed to go—” “It doesn’t matter why you did it! You had no right! You have no clue what you just did!” God yelled. “Now get out!” “Cashel, please. Just hear me out,” Day pleaded. His eyes begged for God to see the sincerity in them. He really didn’t mean for any of this to happen. “Baby, I swear. I didn’t know any of this was happening between you and your family. You should’ve told me. Why was he calling you a murderer?” No matter what, Day couldn’t turn off his detective side. Day watched God squeeze his eyes shut. He went down on one knee and clutched his chest when the hard coughing started again. God’s eyes were full of water and pain. Day timidly eased over to God’s side but God cut his eyes at him, daring him to come any closer. Day had to fight the moisture in his own eyes. “I just want to help you into bed.” “Day, if you don’t get the fuck out of my house, I’m going to show you why he called me a murderer,” God said through clenched teeth. Day couldn’t stop the gasp that escaped his lips, or the pain that radiated through his chest, as if his rib cage had been torn open and his heart ripped out and thrown underneath the bed. Day kept his eyes on God as he knelt to pick up the dresser, then the television. God watched him as well. Day didn’t say anything as the rogue tear fell down his face without his permission. Day went around to the opposite side of the bed and pulled a pen and piece of scrap paper from the drawer, still watching God carefully. He really didn’t like the look on his best friend’s face. He’d seen the look before, but he’d never had it leveled on him. Day scribbled a couple of phone numbers on the paper.

I tried picturing all those places on that map of BeeCee. That’s what we call our country now, just letters of its real name what most people have forgot or don’t care to remember. The map said that old name behind all the scribblings, all the new borders and territories my nana drawn on, but I could only read letters then, not whole words. All I know is that one day all the maps became useless and we had to make our own. The old’uns called that day the Fall or the Reformation. Nana said some down in the far south called it Rapture. Nana was a babe when it happened, said her momma called it the Big Damn Stupid. Set everything back to zero. I never asked why, never much cared. Life is life and you got to live it in the here-now not the back-then. And the here-now for little me was the Thick Woods, with night coming fast. I

Nathan Myrhvold had been a protégé of the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking before forming a software company in Berkeley, California, with some fellow Princeton University Ph.D’s. What drew Myrhvold, or any physicist, to programming? The outer reaches of science increasingly relied on computers; the days of a genius scribbling formulas on the back of an envelope had almost vanished. Physicists usually saw programming as a means to an end. Myrhvold found that his attachment to software superseded his fascination with physical science. His company gained wide notice when he and his friends wrote a faster, smaller clone of IBM’s TopView graphics program. IBM briefly considered making TopView the software interface—the piece seen by customers—for PCs. Trying to keep pace with IBM, Gates wanted a clone of TopView, so he bought Myrhvold’s company. Since

Dumbstruck, Anna sat on the stool the earl had used for his trimming. He had a backward sort of charm to him, Anna thought, her fingers drifting over her cheek. After four days of barking orders, hurling thunderbolts, and scribbling lists at her in Tolliver’s absence, he thanked her with a lovely little kiss. She should have chided him—might have, if he’d held still long enough—but he’d caught her unawares, just as when he’d frowned at her hand and seen she had no wedding ring. Her

Don’t trouble yourself with me.” The thought of a heavy meal for breakfast made Lily’s stomach churn. “I’ll be happy enough with a cup of coffee—if you have any to spare.” Vera stopped in midswirl and took in Lily’s appearance. “Coffee? My, my, my. You need more meat on your bones, girl. You’ll blow away with the slightest breeze. Don’t you agree, Connell?” Lily glanced to the corner spot, only to find the young man she’d met the previous evening staring at her above spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He quickly looked back at the open book in front of him, but the slight reddish tint creeping up his neck above his collar was evidence that he’d been paying more attention to her than to his books. “I’m sure Miss Young would appreciate whatever you’re willing to provide.” The young man pulled out his pocket watch and peered at it. “Especially considering the fact that breakfast has been over for exactly one hour and twelve minutes.” His hair was neatly combed, except for one sun-bleached streak that fell across his forehead. He’d shaven the scruff from his face, revealing skin that was rough and bronzed from long days outdoors. “Connell McCormick.” Vera thumped her hands onto her hips. “You sure don’t seem to mind when I sneak you an extra doughnut or two. I think half the reason you loiter here in the mornings is because you hope I’ll feed you more.” The faint red streaks climbed up to the base of his cheeks. He didn’t say anything and instead dipped his head and scribbled something into one of his books, as if there were nothing more important at that moment than the page in front of him.

If your coping mechanism to date has been to ignore your weight, don't feel badly. You're in good company. I've done my share of standing on the doctor's scale backwards, cringing as the nurse scribbled on the clipboard, anxious when the doctor came in glancing over my record. I scrutinized his face for any semblance of judgment. Whether or not I faced the scale or the doctor skipped a pep talk, it didn't change the truth and it still pervaded every hour of my waking thoughts. I knew what I needed to do and just agonizingly prolonged it. What about you? We want our lies to be true--desperately. We think it means less work, less pain. But aren't we experiencing work and pain every day when we are obese? We don't escape it, we just reallocate it, attach it to different problems. The sooner we face the numbers and start to deal with them, the sooner we can resolve them.

SKANK is scribbled in ballpoint pen on my desk. I don’t exactly know why my heart starts to thump. It’s not like there aren’t messages and other handiwork all over this school. Take auditorium seat J-8. I found out during last week’s Expectations of Excellence assembly that it’s got a faded image of a penis carved on the armrest. No one likes to sit in the Pecker Chair for an assembly. People make fun of you the whole day after that. Ask Rob.

Something hit him, and it didn’t feel particularly good. He picked up the picture and looked at the man’s face. So, you’re the guy, he thought. He didn’t look like a bad guy—but clearly he had done something to Mel. Something she was having trouble getting beyond. Maybe he’d left her for another woman—but that seemed impossible to imagine. Maybe he left her for a man. Oh, please let it be so—I can make that better—just give me five minutes. Or maybe he looked harmless but had been an impossible asshole and she’d broken off with him, but still loved him helplessly. And here she had his picture right there, to be the last face she saw before falling asleep at night. At some point she was going to give Jack a chance to make that picture go away, but it wasn’t going to be tonight. Probably just as well. If she woke to find him there, either in her bed or ready to be, she would put the blame on Crown Royal. He wanted it to come from desire—and he wanted it to be real. He scribbled a note. I’ll be back for you at 8:00 a.m. Jack. He left it by the coffeepot. Then he went to his truck to get something he’d purchased earlier in the day. He brought the leather case holding the dismantled fly fishing rod and reel and the waders into the house and left them by the front door. And went home. *

Oh, dear,” said Mom when I came downstairs. “You aren’t going to wear that to the dentist’s office, are you? Well, there’s no time to change. Let’s go.” “Mom,” I said. “Good morning. How are you doing? Listen, could I go to the dentist later? Important things to do today.” Mom wearily pointed to the yellow paper on the table that announced, THIS IS A 3-2-1 DAY, in bright red crayon. “Does that mean no, Mom?” I said. “Why don’t you just say so?” Mom shrugged her shoulders and looked at me sadly. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to go,” she said. “I can’t change the appointment now.” I picked up a napkin and scribbled a reply. SO LET’S GET MOVING. And we did, without even time for a piece of fruit. At Dr. Dory’s office, Ellen cried and fussed and had perfect teeth. I sat quietly through the whole exam and he found two cavities, my first. I was shocked! Mom was embarrassed. She pointed to the chart Dr. Dory keeps of all the kids who have perfect teeth. “Now you won’t get to be in the Great Teeth Club,” she said. “Maybe you need to brush longer. Ellen seems to spend more time at it than you.” I looked up at the bright, curved light over my head and thought about the sun shining on the even-tempered Turtle People. They would never get upset over teeth, such a small part of the big scheme of things.

I swallowed the coffee while staring at the strange drawings and data I had scribbled the day before. Among my sketches, one mysterious figure stood out—faceless, cloaked, hooded, and pointing a gnarled hand toward someone or something unseen. The pages that followed contained descriptions of another world, perhaps another dimension … things that just now were incomprehensible. I pored over them, trying to grasp their significance, when smack! a firm hand clamped down hard on my shoulder. “Not bad for the new guy in town.

Halpern wants the reader to think about the difference between asking “How are you feeling?” and “Do you want me to ask how you’re feeling?” Even if it’s your mother whom you’re questioning, the first approach is more intrusive, insistent, demanding. The second is much gentler and allows the person simply to say no on those days when she’s doing well and doesn’t want to be the “sick person,” or is doing badly but wants a distraction, or has simply answered the question too many times that day to want to answer it again, even to someone as close as a son. I scribbled down on a scrap of paper a version of that question and two other things I didn’t want to forget from this book and stuck the creased paper in my wallet. Here’s what I wrote: 1. Ask: “Do you want to talk about how you’re feeling?” 2. Don’t ask if there’s anything you can do. Suggest things, or if it’s not intrusive, just do them. 3. You don’t have to talk all the time. Sometimes just being there is enough. The

Dear Russell, Please don’t fall in love with Mrs. Smith’s niece. I— Caleb’s dash crossed the entire page. Then he filled up the rest of the sheet with doodles, drawing stars and spirals and little tic-tac-toe boards. I love you, he wrote at the bottom, in tiny letters. I want to be with you. I want you to wait for me till I’m ready, and I can’t ask because for all I know you’d be waiting till doomsday, because I don’t know how to accept He wrote a series of dashes. He scribbled some more stars. He flipped over the page, and wrote on the back: that you might leave me. That it might not last. And also that it might last, it might be real, it might be something I have to tell my parents about one day, I might have to choose you over the entire rest of the world. That I might choose you over the entire rest of the world, and you might change your mind. He could not look at it anymore. He flipped the paper back over, and wrote one more sentence among the scattered stars. But I am going to try.

In our world, where rapid response seems to be more valued than reflection, the diary might be just a sort of daily exercise we need to draw us back into a richer present. Perhaps we would all be happier if we sort out a little time and space for own inner Pepys. If we went to a chamber once a day to scribble down our thoughts on the day. If we stopped browsing, pausing, surfing and tweeting, and began really looking around us at the small Very Important Things who knows the next day might even go better.