July 2006I've discovered a handy test for figuring out what you're addictedto. Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's houseon a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops onthe island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also,you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it willhave more than any house might.What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing?That's what you're addicted to. For example, if you find yourselfpacking a bottle of vodka (just in case), you may want to stop andthink about that.For me the list is four things: books, earplugs, a notebook, and apen.There are other things I might bring if I thought of it, like music,or tea, but I can live without them. I'm not so addicted to caffeinethat I wouldn't risk the house not having any tea, just for aweekend.Quiet is another matter. I realize it seems a bit eccentric totake earplugs on a trip to an island off the coast of Maine. Ifanywhere should be quiet, that should. But what if the person inthe next room snored? What if there was a kid playing basketball?(Thump, thump, thump... thump.) Why risk it? Earplugs are small.Sometimes I can think with noise. If I already have momentum onsome project, I can work in noisy places. I can edit an essay ordebug code in an airport. But airports are not so bad: most of thenoise is whitish. I couldn't work with the sound of a sitcom comingthrough the wall, or a car in the street playing thump-thump music.And of course there's another kind of thinking, when you're startingsomething new, that requires complete quiet. You neverknow when this will strike. It's just as well to carry plugs.The notebook and pen are professional equipment, as it were. Thoughactually there is something druglike about them, in the sense thattheir main purpose is to make me feel better. I hardly ever goback and read stuff I write down in notebooks. It's just that ifI can't write things down, worrying about remembering one idea getsin the way of having the next. Pen and paper wick ideas.The best notebooks I've found are made by a company called Miquelrius.I use their smallest size, which is about 2.5 x 4 in.The secret to writing on suchnarrow pages is to break words only when you run out of space, likea Latin inscription. I use the cheapest plastic Bic ballpoints,partly because their gluey ink doesn't seep through pages, andpartly so I don't worry about losing them.I only started carrying a notebook about three years ago. Beforethat I used whatever scraps of paper I could find. But the problemwith scraps of paper is that they're not ordered. In a notebookyou can guess what a scribble means by looking at the pagesaround it. In the scrap era I was constantly finding notes I'dwritten years before that might say something I needed to remember,if I could only figure out what.As for books, I know the house would probably have something toread. On the average trip I bring four books and only read one ofthem, because I find new books to read en route. Really bringingbooks is insurance.I realize this dependence on books is not entirely good—that whatI need them for is distraction. The books I bring on trips areoften quite virtuous, the sort of stuff that might be assignedreading in a college class. But I know my motives aren't virtuous.I bring books because if the world gets boring I need to be ableto slip into another distilled by some writer. It's like eatingjam when you know you should be eating fruit.There is a point where I'll do without books. I was walking insome steep mountains once, and decided I'd rather just think, if Iwas bored, rather than carry a single unnecessary ounce. It wasn'tso bad. I found I could entertain myself by having ideas insteadof reading other people's. If you stop eating jam, fruit startsto taste better.So maybe I'll try not bringing books on some future trip. They'regoing to have to pry the plugs out of my cold, dead ears, however.
