Charles Lamb's folios

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?
New Year's Eve Esaays of Elia (1823)

I have frequently thought of Lamb when people talk about the loss of books and the rise of e-books. Not that Lamb would have wanted e-books. The point is Lamb would not have wanted what we call books. A paperback would have been, I suspect, as repellant to him as an e-book.
I used to encounter an old professor in the stacks when I was a grad student. On the several occasions when I was carrying an eighteenth century book, he would say to me, "Ah, I see you have a real book."

Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's Taxonomy

The Wikipedia page on the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's Taxonomy :

those that belong to the Emperor,
embalmed ones,
those that are trained,
suckling pigs,
mermaids,
fabulous ones,
stray dogs,
those included in the present classification,
those that tremble as if they were mad,
innumerable ones,
those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
others,
those that have just broken a flower vase,
those that from a long way off look like flies.

from Jorge Luis Borges' story, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"

De Quincey

Man is doubtless one by some subtle nexus, some system of links, that we cannot perceive, extending from the new-born infant to the superannuated dotard: but, as regards many affections and passions incident to his nature at different stages, he is not one, but an intermitting creature, ending and beginning anew
Thomas De Quincey

quoted in Virginia Woolf's Common Reader

Reading/Writing

I attended a lecture last night, something I usually enjoy, and no doubt there were details in the lecture to enjoy, but somehow the stress of this time of year makes listening to someone natter on about his job and his concerns seem tedious. I found myself thinking that it would have been an interesting fifteen minute presentation—sad fact when one's career identity is interesting for fifteen minutes but not for forty-five.

Anyway, I opened my Moseskine notebook to take notes, and, when things became dull in the talk, I began to read, and later to write. I did not write about the paper, but about what I read in my notebook: stuff about myself over the past few years.

My point is that there is something about the notebook, about turning back the pages to earlier long-buried selves.