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Bring Back the Zibaldone
An old-school form of journaling helped lead to my book about interactions, strangers, and memory.
When I feel imprisoned by the clenched, corporate-souled, Google-calendared demand for never-ending productivities and supposedly uber-practical hurtling toward more and newly-sprouted results, with takeaways as the only high meaning, I often slip out a surprising trapdoor, one with a funny name: the zibaldone. Also known as a common-place book, it was initially used by 14th century Venetian merchants as a wild notebook that haphazardly combined “a heap of things” including memorable encounters, aphorisms, recipes, business notations, descriptions of cloud formations, and any other (fleetingly) noteworthy ephemera. It’s not a scrapbook with stubs and photos and cherished memories, but rather a scrapbook of the mind. One page: whatever is capturing your attention right now—the way your cat’s tail curls into a question mark. Another: these Rodriguez lyrics: “But how much of you is repetition / That you didn’t whisper to him too.” It’ll start wringing things out of you —the dregs of the day but surprisingly colorful. Cuttings of a relationship, things you can’t bear to not remember. Gleanings from a magazine article that would otherwise slink entirely from your mind. This journal accepts all comers, reveling in the many folds of the self.
