Notebook

Use in the book

The notebook is first a discontinuous record. In March 1833 Guérin looks back to his beginning on July 10, 1832 and explains the long gaps through suffering. Writing does not automatically accompany experience: pain can prevent the reflective freedom that would turn it into observation. Later, numbness likewise reduces his returns to the page.

At Le Val the record is deliberately prospective. He means to preserve the happiness he expects to reread after departure. On the last evening he and his companions contemplate the faint image already traced in the notebook as if it were a dear person lost. The object is private and intimate, but not demonstrably inaccessible to every other reader.

In Caen it becomes a sweet friend to whom he returns after the intimidating crowd. The April 1834 apostrophe makes the personification expansive: soul, intelligence, patience, charity, and unfailing sympathy are attributed to paper expressly denied to be merely inert matter. The desired listener both supports the speaker and can lean upon him in return. Writing creates the form of a reciprocal relation unavailable, or felt unavailable, elsewhere.

The notebook is thus archive, companion, and scene of experiment. Its value is not exhausted by documentary information about a life. It holds changing relations to time, language, and companionship, including the risk that even the most intimate words will fail to equal what was felt.

Places to read

1. 3 March 1833 · ¶1The backward glance dates the beginning and explains the discontinuity of early entries.
2. 7 December 1833 · ¶4Recording present happiness is explicitly intended to support future rereading.
3. 20 January 1834 · ¶3The written image of shared happiness is contemplated with companions before departure.
4. 24 January 1834 · ¶1Address to the cahier establishes it as an intimate friend after distressing urban encounters.
5. 20 April 1834 · ¶1The notebook's personification gives precise form to the desired relation of sympathy and care.
6. 26 September 1833 · ¶1A brief thought about memories attached to natural things ends in printed omission points; the next entry explicitly returns to the interrupted attempt without supplying the missing words.

Translation in this edition

The English normally renders “cahier” as “notebook.” In March 16, 1834, however, “un petit journal” is the small newspaper accepting Guérin's articles, not the cahier addressed here.