It begins with an "Initial Public Offering" (punctuated by nearly 40 parenthetical asides—some as long as a paragraph). In it, the author, disarmingly casual, explains his method. It goes something like this: Since 2007, Princeton professor Jeff Nunokawa has written a short reflection every morning in response to a phrase from a work of literature using Facebook’s Notes application. These were originally intended for his friends and current and former students, but at some point, he decided to select some out of the over 3,000, revise them ("And revise them. And revise them. And revise them."), and publish them in a book "to address" our shared "state of loneliness." The result is Note Book, "a work of strange and enduring wonder" according to The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead.
I’d say it’s a little more mixed than that.
The collection gets off to a bumpy start, given how much Nunokawa has revised. The first entry is a gloss on Henry James’s recommendation that aspiring writers "Try to be one of the people upon whom nothing is lost." Nunokawa writes (emphasis mine):
But what if the cost of being one of those people is that you yourself get lost yourself? Maybe such a lethal price tag can be avoided by careful shopping. I’m not by nature a careful shopper myself, but you try to learn what you need to learn before the learning comes too late.
The unnecessary repetition aside, the value of this short reflection rests on the metaphors "get lost" and "careful shopping." But what does losing oneself mean here (a life devoted to writing alone? living vicariously?) and how can it be avoided by "careful shopping"? I have a vague sense of what Nunokawa might mean, but it’s a half thought at best.
His style becomes smoother as the notes become more personal, and there are a few laudable remarks on famous lines (more on those below), but too many are banal or, like the entry quoted above, mostly flourish.
For example, if you claim, as Nunokawa does, that you discovered early in life you wanted "to write at the deep end of the pool," it’s probably best to avoid dog-paddling with statements or advice like: The key to talking to people "you don’t like" is to "listen." "Philosophy doesn’t start with a win." It starts "with wonder." Or: "Sometimes I get discouraged when I realize that most of what I write will never see much light of day. But then I remember how some of the best practices aren’t aimed to reach past the ages, but rather just to get us through the night."
He has a particular penchant for that favorite trick of contemporary writers: the pithy inversion. Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, he writes, portrays "a peace that surpasses any common understanding, any understanding of the common." "The answer never seems to come on time. But when it comes, it’s just in time." On "surviving" youth, he asks, "did I survive it, or did it survive me?" We have to be careful about the words we use, he writes, "because they can’t be careful about the way they use us." On Susan Sontag’s remark that Walter Benjamin "liked finding things where nobody was looking," Nunokawa writes: "Same here. I like finding things where nobody was looking—me included." And so, and so on. This is instant wisdom and about as satisfying as most things instant.
Nunokawa also occasionally muddies the waters to give the impression of deep swimming when in reality we’re just a few feet out. In a gloss on Frank O’Hara’s poem "Early Mondrian," he writes: "Whatever it is, we always depend on the kindness of the strange." On Izaak Walton’s remark that he "shall see" John Donne "reanimated" at the Resurrection, Nunokawa remarks that "the routes from that promise to various renaissance, romantic, and modern renovations of a fatigued sense of sight are well marked. Less definitely delineated is what is lost in these translations. And what is lost, precisely, must be lost, because it cannot be defined." Translation: The doctrine of the Resurrection was invented. Works of great artistry or wisdom can be ambiguous, but not all ambiguity is smart or interesting.
In short, as a collection of reflections on great works of literature, Note Book misses more than it hits, but there are some hits. Regarding Francis Bacon’s essay on truth, he writes that "truth may require our care not only because it is important, but also because it may appear quite unimportant." M. I. Finely remarked that Homer "made the Gods into men." Nunokawa adds "And I guess the first thing he learned about himself was that he himself wasn’t actually much of God."
Nunokawa claims he has tried to be honest in these notes—to "communicate some version of ‘me’ to some version of ‘you’," as he puts it in his introduction. The version of himself he most often tries to communicate is supposed to be smart, sensitive, and funny, but his language won’t quite allow him to be these things. He can’t sleep because he can’t stop thinking. "At least once a day," he writes, "I lose all hope." (All hope? Once a day? At least?) He quotes himself alongside Chaucer and Dickens, and then comments on it, which may be a joke, but it doesn’t read like one.
Despite all this, he can also occasionally charm. He confesses he’s bad at foreign languages (and wishes he weren’t) and asks towards the end of the book, as he reads over his previous notes, "Am I wrong about everything? Do I seem like an ass, just generally?" This isn’t a ploy for sympathy, but genuine questioning that makes Note Book at least partially redeemable.
What does the book show us about the relationship between social media, community, and writing? Not a whole lot, other than to remind us of how hard it is to genuinely write for other people and not merely for attention. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, of course, but they often are.