The notebook · August 8, 2026

The List of Names

I keep a list of names. It started on a notebook page years ago and it has never really got shorter: adding is easier than taking away.

On the evenings when I have nothing to say — and there are many — I read it back. That was the whole idea: that what is written would pray in my place on the dry days. It works. It works a little too well, and that is what I wanted to write down tonight.

Because yesterday I heard myself going down the list. Seven names in under a minute, at the speed of a shopping list. Two of them stand for situations I have known nothing about since the winter. Another has been there so long that I can’t remember what I first asked for. I said them all correctly. I felt nothing at all.

What bothered me wasn’t the absence of feeling — I’ve come to accept that fervour isn’t the rent you pay to pray. It was something else: it felt like keeping accounts. As though the list existed to prove I forget no one. As though I were the archive.

Isaiah has a line that settles the question, and I had always read it as general consolation: “Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:16, World English Bible). It is said to a city convinced it has been forgotten. Engraved — not noted, not memorised. On the palms, which is to say in the place you cannot avoid seeing while you work.

So my list is not doing what I thought. It isn’t there to keep the names on record somewhere: they already are, and better than by me. It is there so that I show up. It is a meeting point, not a register — and a meeting can be kept distractedly, late, feeling nothing, without being cancelled by any of that.

I have changed nothing since. I haven’t sorted it, or shortened it, or recovered the intensity of the early evenings. I still read it slightly too fast. But I no longer read it to prove anything, and I’ve noticed that I now stop, almost every time, on one name at random — the one that catches, for no reason. Just one, a little more slowly.

That may be all the list was ever meant to produce.

In Manna, I can carry these names one at a time, on the days when I have nothing to say.