My Blank Pages

Among the aphorisms of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg I found this fragment: “About the peculiar charm of white paper, bound into a book. Paper which hasn’t yet lost its virginity and still shines in the colour of innocence is always better than after it has been used.” I understand the seductiveness of Lichtenberg’s observation, and probably shared it when I was younger, but now it sounds like Platonic mooning after perfection. We see this literary romanticizing of purity and nothingness in Flaubert, Mallarme and, on a more ridiculous level, John Cage.

I too admire the beauty of fine paper, its silken sheen or textured, canvas-like weave, but I see nothing in it of a sexual nature, as Lichtenberg’s metaphors imply. Stacked on shelves in bookstores and sold as “journals” are thick volumes of blank sheets bound in stamped leather. In the context of a bookstore, they seem like a cynical, Duchampian joke. How many are purchased in a spirit of confident inspiration, only to be abandoned after a few feeble scribbles?

My five-year-old son, a kindergartener on the cusp of reading, keeps a journal consisting entirely of pencil drawings – spiky robots, a crowned King Kong, a devil with a pitchfork, a sperm-like snake, blueprints for gratuitously elaborate contraptions worthy of Rube Goldberg. His pages are dense with detail, like Robert Walser’s manuscripts. I like their clutter. Paper is made to be filled with evidence of our recognition that blankness is a reproach, not an ideal.