Clare Stein

A notebook nearing completion bears a very specific and concrete satisfaction. I commenced this specific journal, about the size of my extended hand, deep red and thick-paged, on the flight from New York to France in late September 2010.  Looking from the beginning of this notebook is like sifting through wreckage, but I am pleased by what has come of it. With other journals I’ve bought recently, I’ve imposed some intention of “real production,” a jello mold of seriousness. They’re “writing notebooks,” and they quiver with thoughts too-hard-wrought onto the page.  I started this notebook with an ivory tower tone, too, but I still love the first page’s Thoreau citation:  All sound is nearly akin to silence; it is a bubble on her surface which straightaway bursts, an emblem of the strength and prolificness of the undercurrent. It is a faint utterance of Silence, and then only agreeable to our auditory nerves when it contrasts itself with the former. In proportion as it does this, and is a heightener and intensifier of the Silence, it is harmony and purest melody. from Thoreau’s journal, December 1838 The following pages of my own journal may be less impressive, and are surely a contrast from the clean Silence/ Sound melody of Thoreau’s vision. It’s a loopy, bilingual, disorderly mélange of to-do and grocery lists, directions and elaborately drawn maps, phone numbers, schedules, lesson plans, doodles, scrabble scores, and the occasional thought.  These are the remnants of my time in France, and now seem preserved like source documents of a recent past. From when I first searched for an apartment: calculations of rent plus monthly charges with panicked exclamation points. Troubles with the bank figure in every early to-do list (see: “Call bank. Then go to bank,” Oct. 23; “ask again about carte bancaire @ banque,” Nov. 13; and the increasingly desperate “CARTE BANCAIRE” of Nov. 20). I’m reminded of when I felt lost in this city, when the streets that I now automatically short-cut were just lines on GoogleMaps with very foreign-sounding names. I’m returning to the U.S, at least for a while, at the end of July. I’ll be needing a new notebook. 

Fond memories of last summer:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used that word in Lit papers. It’s sort of an ungraspable concept, though. Is it the very elusiveness that makes transcendence transcendent? My brain hurts. At this point I speak neither French nor English, and the fact that transcendence transcends language (?) does not make it easier to think about or write about. I do love this quotation nicked from a Rumpus review of the 2001: A Space Odyssey - inflected film Moon, featuring more Sam Rockwell than you ever thought possible.  “Such moments could be cut or trimmed without sacrificing the momentum of the plot, and yet the best filmmakers realize that plot and mood are two sides of the same coin and that it is in these in-between moments—the moments when the film breaks down, or pauses—where the best chances for transcendence lie. “  Find the full article here.