One More Quote for the Road

Toussaint's narrator in "Television" (noted below) on keeping notebooks with him at all times. Poignant and then odd.

I always took a few of these with me when I went out, slipping them into my pocket before leaving my study, gradually filling them with bits or fragments of sentences, thoughts and aphorisms, observations and remarks (the latter being generally only the more accurate expression of the next-to-latter), which as a rule I never made use of in my actual work. No matter how brilliant, an idea really wasn't worth keeping if you couldn't even remember it without writing it down, it seemed to me. Besides, whenever I opened one of those notebooks as I lay on my bed or sat at my desk, paging through it a bit, happily lingering over the few drawings or pencil sketches I'd scratched out here and there, I inevitably found nothing particularly interesting in all those pages I'd methodically filled up day after day; so wonderfully luminous when they first came to me, so feverishly scrawled down, my ideas now seemed sadly faded, their ink dried, their perfume blown away. Viewed with detachment, with neither enthusiasm nor disgust, their effect on me was more or less that of my underpants when I stuffed them into a plastic bag before heading off to the laundry room: only a vague, familiar affection, rooted more in the memory of a brief moment of communion than in any real objective merit.