I’ve been dearly departed from my notebooks in recent weeks, busy with marking and meetings and children and life. It’s a busy-ness that wrenches me from the bush and beach, the paintbrush, the pencil, the pen and paper.
I wear my busy-ness like a badge of honour. It is worn, but it is also wearying. I desperately desire a return to writing in slow motion.
I’ve written previously about the importance of slowing down: slow philosophy, slow thinking, slow reading. But in truth, I give lip service to suggestions of pace. The question remains: how exactly do we write in slow motion when we’re committed to all the busy?
New York writer and English professor Jillian Hess has spent the past two decades writing and thinking about the way we take notes. Her work makes me think about my desire to go slow. Hess’s substack, entitled “Noted”, details some of her most interesting discoveries: the latest entry focuses on the writer Sylvia Plath’s note-taking habits.
At Hess attests, Plath wrote and sketched the world around her with a determined intensity. Hess’s examples reveal Plath’s handwriting slopes to the left. Her sketches sink into the page like punctuation marks. Her thinking and storytelling encompass handwritten pages, as well as sketches, drawings, and paintings. It is all evidence of her commitment to paying attention. It is commitment to slow, a commitment to creativity, a commitment in analogue.
Plath’s world on a page is a manual labour of love. Laborious is an adjective that suggests “much time, effort or careful attention”.1 Plath’s notebooks reveal her commitment to going slow: slow writing, slow sketching, slow thinking. To be critical and creative, going slow needs to stay in our vicinity. Because we could all use a bit more analogue in our lives.
Merriam Webster Dictionary, “Laborious”.
This is so beautiful! Plath's creativity is a gift that keeps giving.