5 Love Notes
"Attention is the beginning of devotion."
It’s that time of year—when pink hearts and cupid’s arrows float in store windows. Love as a concept is incredibly expansive. And yet, so much in our culture effectively flattens it into a specific kind of romantic narrative. And while romantic love is wonderful, it is not the only kind of love. Dare I say, it might not even be the most important kind of love. So, on this Valentine’s-Day week I’m sharing a different variety of love note.
Last year, I wrote about various love notes drawn from a selection of notebooks I’d covered over the previous year. In the comments section
brought up the love of place and asked if I came across any love notes to animals. A year later, here are my extended replies…Love of Place
I mostly love living in New York City, but sometimes I hate it. I believe this is a healthy reaction to such a wild and unwieldy city. Yet, I never love New York City more than when I am at the New York Public Library’s main branch on 5th Avenue. It is magisterial and ornate and guarded by regal lions. Jack Kerouac, I learned, agrees with me.
1) Jack Kerouac and Public Libraries
The wonder of public libraries was not lost on Jack Kerouac, who wrote gorgeously about the NYPL in his journals—which, incidentally, I read in the NYPL. And, okay, yes, he was also writing about the Boston Public Library, which is lovely too.
ON BIG CITY LIBRARIES
The two big city libraries that I’ve had occasion to frequent, the one in Boston and the bigger one in New York, always fill me with an unspeakable feeling of delight when I go to them, a delight that is compounded of these various things: seeing mad old men wander around in deep meditation, seeing pigeons in the court from the window of the library john, seeing pretty girls sitting and reading, and finally participating in a general gloating feeling that this is “culture” of the highest order and that all we who are gathered here are inveterate deep thinkers. I like to stalk around like a mad thinker with my topcoat flying behind me. But I never have written a decent line in a library.
2) Rachel Carson and the Sea
The environmentalist Rachel Carson’s first love was the sea. She labeled some of her notebooks with the location they cover, such as the following field notebook for the National Bison Range and Red Rock Lakes Refuge:
Because she began her career studying sea life, Carson’s first books were a trio on the ocean: Under the Sea-Wind, The Edge of the Sea, and The Sea Around Us. As she wrote these books, she sat at the shore with a pencil and field notebook—small enough to fit in one’s palm.
On this page, Carson records all sorts of information about waves. You can almost feel her wonder at the natural phenomenon.
Love of Animals
If you’ve been reading Noted for a while, you’ll know about my deep, abiding love for my cat, Cali. I’ve written many diary entries about her…and around her. She enjoys sitting on my notebooks.
Here are two more animal-lovers and their notes.
3) Rachel Carson on Birds, Insects, and her Cat
Let’s return to Rachel Carson, whose love of the sea extended to animals that also love the water. With her pencil and a tiny notebook, Carson captures the sound of bird song in her notes:
The song of the white throat in the snow is so faint, so tentative, a whisper, hardly to be heard. Perhaps if one had never heard the full outpouring of his spirit in Spring he would not even hear this dreamy whisper above the trickling of melting snow and the rustle of oak leaves in the wind.1
In another notebook she writes her reflections on katydids (a kind of cricket). She records with wonder that
Insect voices probably the first ever heard on earth
Beneath that, she reflects on her cats and ponders why her cat isn’t interested in Katydids even though
Cats have that first quality of a good scientist—an insatiable curiosity—a desire to investigate all that is strange—to touch, to feel…
Carson loved her cats and considered them essential writing companions (as many of us do).
4) Jane Goodall’s Chimpanzees
Perhaps one of the greatest love stories of our time is that between Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees. She devoted the first part of her life to studying them. And then she devoted the second part of her life to saving them and their natural habitat. Goodall’s notes on her chimps are filled with such curiosity and Jane wrote down everything she observed: facial expressions, feeding habits, social interactions, playful behavior, mating rituals, and parenting habits. And then, under a kerosene lamp’s illumination, she would update her notes while the day’s events were fresh in her mind. Often, she recorded her disappointment at how difficult it was to find chimps to observe.
Wednesday—10th August
Woke to realize that it was going to be quite impossible to hear chimps however close they might be. The wind was quite gale force….
At 2pm I happened to see 2 chimps—miles and miles away. They were moving up a tree, but almost as I saw them, they vanished. They were right at the top of the furthest away mountain.
But there are also moments of triumphant discovery in Jane’s notes. For example, here, Jane records how a chimp used a bit of straw to get termites out of a hole:
He reached up and appeared to ‘test’ 3 or 4 pieces of straw before finally breaking off a piece about 2 1/2 feet long. Holding it in his left hand he broke it off with his mouth and returned to his place with it in his mouth. Then ran it through his fingers pulling it through his right hand with his left, then back. Then holding it in his left he bit off the required piece (near a node)…He then moistened the end of the straw with his lips, and still holding it with his left hand appeared to be pushing it downwards. In actual fact it must have been along the surface of the ground—there being no holes! As he pushed it along he moved his hand further back down the straw. Then lifted it, coated with termites & ate them all, using his lips and tongue…
You can see some of Jane’s adventures with the chimps in this fantastic documentary:
Love of Notes
And, finally, I’ve been thinking about notebooks in relation to love. Deciding to focus on something to the point of taking notes, to study it, to pay attention—isn’t that a form of love? As Mary Oliver teaches us:
Attention is the beginning of devotion.2
5) Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Love for His Notes
Like many of us, Emerson loved note-taking. He loved it so much, he left behind over 263 notebooks. He titled his inaugural collection “The Wide World”—a name he would use for the next four years, filling thirteen editions. After that, he moved on to designating his notebooks with roman numerals and then alphabetic letters.
At the beginning of the first “Wide World,” Emerson describes his goals as follows:
These pages are intended at their commencement to contain a record of new thoughts (when they occur); for a receptacle of all the old ideas that partial but peculiar peelings at antiquity can finish or furbish; for tablet to save the wear & tear of weak Memory & in short for all the various purposes & utility real or imaginary which are usually comprehended under that comprehensive title Common Place book. O ye witches assist me!3
By the third edition of “The Wide World,” Emerson declares his experiment successful. In the fourth edition, Emerson exclaims:
I love my Wide Worlds!4
Let’s celebrate love in all its glorious, myriad forms! Head over to our chat and share one of your love notes. Shower us with your love of animals, your love of places, your love of people, your love of words, your love of nature…whatever you love enough to take notes on. This could be a picture of a note taken in a notebook or a typed quote or a photograph.
Here is my contribution: I love Mary Oliver’s writing and, while Winter is my least favorite season, I love naked trees with their skeletal lattice of branches.
This quote comes from Mary Oliver’s essay, “Upstream.”
And/or tell us what you love in the comments!
Yours in Note-Taking,
Carson Field Notes, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 46, Box 108 Folder 2081.
Oliver, Mary. Upstream: Collected Essays
Emerson, The Journals, I, 3-4.
Emerson, The Journals, II. 134.
I keep a notebook at my desk where I write down little fragments throughout the day. People I see on my way to work, things I read online, ideas, etc. Only a tiny portion of my notes end up in an essay or a poem. Some notes begin to coalesce around a theme, like people I see eating lunch alone in a restaurant (a thing I rarely do, which I therefore find fascinating). Sometimes it feels compulsive. I do see it as a practice that is based in love--cultivating a love of time, space, and life. Thanks for sharing these other practices. I want to get a topcoat so I can "stalk around like a wild thinker" with Kerouac.
You had me at "Dare I say, it might not even be the most important kind of love" and yes I wholeheartedly agree. 💛