Confronting My Own Sense of Diligence
I had long
considered myself someone who worked quite hard. I devote my holidays to
self-improvement, and on weekdays I spend nearly the entire day immersed in my
work. I recall Dr. Shin Young-jun once remarking that one ought to work more
than eighty hours a week, and at the time, I believed I was putting in roughly
that much effort myself.
Title : The Notebook - A History of Thinking on Paper -
Author : Roland Allen
Discovering the Diligence of Writers Before Us
Yet reading
The Person Who Writes left me marveling at just how extraordinary people of
earlier generations truly were. They lived without access to the conveniences
of modern civilization that I, as a contemporary reader, now take for granted.
And still, they recorded and cultivated themselves far more diligently than I
ever have.
The book
describes how, from a young age, Virginia Woolf kept her notebooks with
remarkable dedication—so much so that in one of nearly thirty such volumes,
written in 1919, she recorded having spent an entire week reading Daniel
Defoe's novels closely and deliberately, notebook and pen always in hand,
simply to meet a deadline.
It also
recounts how Paul Valéry devoted himself so completely to his
notebooks—ultimately amounting to some 28,000 pages—that he considered them his
true life's work. For fifty years, he rose at five o'clock every morning
without fail, setting aside private time for intellectual discipline, and in
the process filled 261 notebooks.
A Humbling Realization
Isn't that
remarkable? I find myself feeling ashamed of ever having taken pride in my own
daily efforts. Two hundred and sixty-one notebooks—that is truly astonishing.
Producing a body of work of that scale could only be the fruit of a lifetime
spent recording and studying without pause.
Committing to a Life of Recording and Reflection
I now feel a
genuine need to keep a record of my own life, if only to ensure that its
moments are lived with meaning. Knowing that death will come for all of us
someday, I want to experience—and take in—as much as possible of the vast
knowledge and experience this world has to offer before that time arrives. I
want to miss nothing, to overlook nothing, and to hold it all in both my eyes
and my mind.
This is a book
that has convinced me to always carry a notebook with me from now on.
