The notebook · August 1, 2026

Page Four

I found four notebooks in the same drawer. Four. All started, none finished. And the unsettling part is that they stop in the same place: somewhere around the fourth page.

The first three pages look alike from one notebook to the next. The handwriting is careful there, almost diligent. You can feel someone inaugurating something, wanting to do it well, writing whole sentences. Then the fourth page falls apart — two lines, a date, a single word. After that, blank.

For a long time I thought this was laziness. Now I think it is something else, and less flattering: page four is where you stop writing for the person you would like to be, and where you would have to start writing for the one you are. The first three pages are still a project. The fourth is already a life.

So I buy a new notebook. It works remarkably well: a new notebook makes it possible, once again, to be someone consistent. Nothing in it contradicts that yet. The cover is intact, and so is the intention. Reopening the old one means running into my own handwriting losing breath, and into the unpleasant evidence that I have already tried.

What I discover on rereading them, though, is that those pages are not empty of content. There are requests in them I had completely forgotten, and some of them found their way without me. A worry that took up two paragraphs has dissolved so thoroughly that I could not remember having had it. What I was calling a failed notebook was in fact keeping the memory of things received.

I am not sure there is a lesson in this. I only notice that my way of beginning again almost always involves erasing the previous attempt, as if the traces of one try forbade the next. Before God that reflex is strange: He does not need a blank page to go on with me.

This time I did not buy a notebook. I opened the oldest of the four to page five, and wrote the date. The gap between the two dates is ridiculous. I left it there.

In Manna the day’s page arrives already begun, and I do not have to decide whether I deserve it.