Before there was an internet, I had a little red plaid notebook. Into this little red plaid notebook, I copied – by hand, in pen – quotes from other people; I kept up this practice roughly from 1974 through 1984. Poems, sayings, passages from novels or nonfiction, snippets of song lyrics. Usually in English, occasionally in French (which apparently I once understood). Tennyson, Paul Simon, my best friend Ruth, Dickens, Virginia Woolf, T. H. White... a wondrous jumble of voices. Walt Whitman, A.A. Milne, Jefferson Starship, Simone de Beauvoir, Lord Byron, Erica Jong. I marvel now at the range of my literary tastes back then (as I am simultaneously aware of how narrowly Eurocentric it was). But what I really want to say is that there is something about reading it all in my own handwriting, the sense of intimacy, the sense that these are my accumulated treasures, that keeps me returning to this little red plaid notebook year after year. Here’s the first quote in the notebook: “Man is a mystery. The mystery must be unriddled, and if you spend your whole life unriddling it, do not say that it was wasted time.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky