on old notes and notebooks

Every so often I run across old notes or notebooks that I haven’t seen in months or years. Almost always, I am both happy and alarmed to find that the old notes are of much higher quality than I would have expected. Happy, because it’s inspiring to run across these little treasures. Alarmed, because it suggests that we have more backslides in intellectual life than we remember having. That is to say, if I run across notes from 2003 that really impress me, it suggests that if I had simply progressed a bit further in the past six years then I wouldn’t have been impressed with those old notes.

In any case, I am delighted tonight to have run across the little Mickey Mouse notebook that I purchased in Alexandria on March 10 of this year. The notes in there are going to save me a week or more as I plan the second half of L’objet quadruple. There already I was working out some of the issues that concern me at present.

I told the story on the first incarnation of the blog as to why I came to write philosophy notes in a miniature Mickey Mouse notebook. It wasn’t an act of deliberate cheekiness, I assure you.

Egypt simply doesn’t have many trees. I’m not sure of the details of the paper industry here, and so can’t tell you if all the paper in this country is imported or only a certain percentage. What I can tell you is that paper is not nearly as ubiquitous here as it is in Western countries. (When maple syrup is served here, it is only the tiniest amount. I can’t imagine that there is even one maple tree in all of Egypt.) If I need a notebook in the USA, even the junkiest convenience store will have them for sale. Here, that’s not always true. You can always get paper here too, but you might easily have to try 5 or 6 stores before you find it. In short, Mickey Mouse was the end of the line for me that day, my only option after 20 minutes of searching. Lots of ideas came to mind that day, as is always the case in that wonderful Alexandria air, and I was keen to write them down before they passed away like vapors.

The notebook was made in China, and has the following wonderful words on its cover:

Have a ball..
HAPPY TIME!

MICKEY PROJECT

Mickey is rich in protein and
calcium which help build the
musclesyou need to throw
a ball or climb a tree