moleskine

In the era of electronic mail and word processing I receive a surprising, seemingly old-fashioned, gift via postal service. It's a beautiful moleskine: "the legendary notebook of Hemingway, Picasso, Chatwin," as the information attached to it says. It's a present from a friend-writer, a person who wouldn't laugh at the idea of daily  (no matter the state of the mind and spirit) exercise of writing. A couple of sentences, random at the first glance, to which, nonetheless, you have to select the proper register and some leitmotif, so that even just one paragraph is a miniature of an entity.

I don't think the moleskine will turn me into a proper writer in my mother tongue, which I dare regret, but every word from the attached booklet on its history sounds so promising: Capturing reality on the move, preserving details, impressing the unique aspects of experience upon paper: Moleskine  is a reservoir of ideas and feelings, a battery that stores discoveries an perceptions without depletion. So be it.