The most honest sentence ever written about a notebook is in the afterword to this one, and it was written by the author’s son:
This notebook has been lying among Muhammad Iqbal’s papers. According to this notebook Iqbal started writing it on 27th April 1910. It appears that he continued to write it for several months and then stopped for some unknown reason.
Stopped for some unknown reason.
Javid Iqbal published his father’s private notebook in 1961, fifty-one years after it was begun. He could not say why it ended, so he wrote that it ended, and left it there.
The Desk It Was Written At
Muhammad Iqbal, also known as Allama Iqbal, was a poet and philosopher in Lahore. In April 1910 he was thirty-three.
He had come back from Europe two years earlier with a doctorate and had been called to the Bar. He had joined Government College, Lahore, as a professor of philosophy, and after about eighteen months he resigned it, in his son’s account, “because he felt that he was not free to speak openly as long as he was in Government employment”. He was living in a flat in Anarkali Bazaar, in what the afterword calls severe financial difficulties.
Thirty-three, recently unemployed by his own choice, short of money, and starting a notebook. That is the whole setting and it is more than enough.
What Is In It
He gave it the title himself. Stray Reflections, published by Iqbal Academy Pakistan and edited with an afterword by his son.
His son describes the contents as “odd jottings based on his impressions of the books he was reading at that time, his thoughts and feelings about the environment in which he lived, and reminiscences of his student days”, and then says something that most people would have edited out:
Apparently there is no continuity between the thoughts expressed in this notebook because they were not jotted down according to any fixed plan.
No plan, no continuity, no system. This is the direct opposite of a notebook kept systematically for decades, and it still produced a hundred and twenty-five entries in a few months.
What It Sounds Like
Entry 1 is four words long.
Art is a sacred lie.
That is the whole entry. His son’s description of the style is exact: “Iqbal’s style is very simple, direct and forceful; his abruptness is sometimes startling.”
Entry 88 is called “The Big Library”:
If you have got a big library and know all the books therein, it only shows that you are a rich man, not necessarily that you are a thinker.
Entry 100, “Sunset on the Banks of Ravi”, named for the river at Lahore:
All the wonderful booklore in your library is not worth one glorious sunset on the banks of the Ravi.
Every one of these arrives finished. There is no working out on the page, no second thought, no revision in the margin. He has the idea, he writes it down, he closes it, and he numbers the next one.
The notebook does also carry a few Persian and Urdu couplets he had copied in. Those reach an English reader through the editor’s translation rather than through Iqbal’s own English, so nothing from them is quoted here.
The One Entry That Is a Diary Entry
Number 12 is different from all the others, and the difference is visible before you read a word of it, because it is the only one titled with a date.
15th May, 1910: Yesterday morning at about 4, I saw that glorious visitor of our hemisphere known as Halley’s comet.
He is thirty-three. The comet returns every seventy-five years or so. He works out what that means for him and writes it down:
It is only with the eyes of my grandsons that I shall see it again.
And then the last line of the entry, which is the only moment in the entire notebook where something happens to him rather than occurring to him:
For the moment all ambition was killed in me.
Everything else in the book is a thought. This one is a night.
Then It Stopped
There is no closing entry. Nothing announces itself as the last one. The numbering simply runs to 125 and the notebook is over, some months after it started, for a reason nobody has.
I want to be direct about something this site does not usually admit. The notebooks it keeps track of are selected, without anyone deciding to select them, for having continued. Thoreau’s two million words. Emerson’s decades. Woolf’s twenty-six years. The hero profiles are quietly a survivorship sample, and reading fourteen of them in a row could easily leave you thinking that a notebook which lasted four months was a failure.
This one lasted about four months. It is one of the most quoted private notebooks in South Asia.
A practice that eventually stops is the normal outcome, and the interesting question is not how to prevent it. It is what the notebook is worth afterwards.
Most advice about journalling is really advice about not stopping, which is a strange emphasis given how many of the famous notebooks did stop. I write a short email about what is actually in the archives, including the ones that ran out. You can subscribe here.
He Kept Using It for Twenty-Two Years
Here is the answer, and it is documented entry by entry.
Seven years after he abandoned the notebook, Iqbal began sending its contents out. Thirty of the 1910 entries carry an annotation in this edition recording that they were published in New Era, Lucknow, in 1917. That is a count made directly from the annotations rather than a figure quoted from the book, and anyone with the full text can check it.
And the afterword says the mining went on much longer than that. Entries from this notebook, along with later notes, “did appear from time to time in different English journals, news-papers, etc. of the subcontinent until 1932”.
Twenty-two years of use out of about four months of writing.
The practice failed. The document did not. Those are two different things, and almost nobody separates them, because the advice industry around journalling is built on the first one. Susan Sontag’s notebooks were quarried for later work in exactly the same way, and the site has never put the two cases together until now.
What He Changed When He Published Them
This is the rare part, and it is why the annotations matter more than the entries.
Of the thirty entries marked as republished in 1917, fourteen carry the note that they were printed “without any changes”. The other sixteen were altered, and the annotator, Khurram Ali Shafique, records what was altered in each case.
Some of the changes are one word. In entry 2, “Goethe’s imagination” became “Goethe’s mind” on publication.
The best example is entry 8, “Cruel Psychology”. In the notebook it reads:
Excuse me a bit of cruel Psychology. You fail in your enterprise, and now you wish to leave your home and try your luck in other climes. It is not because your ambition has received a fresh spur from your failure; but chiefly because you wish to hide your face from those who have witnessed your failure.
In 1917 it went out like this:
When we fail in an enterprise we feel inclined to leave our home and try our luck in alien climes. If such is your situation, study your soul closely before deciding one way or the other. Is it because your ambition has received a fresh spur from your failure, or because you wish to hide your face from those who have witnessed your failure? Excuse this bit of cruel Psychology.
Read them side by side and the edit is a single consistent move. The private version tells you what you are doing. The public version opens with “we”, turns the diagnosis into a question, tells you to look for yourself, and only apologises at the end, once the reader has done the work.
He did not soften the idea. He changed who the sentence was about.
That is, as far as I can tell, the whole difficulty of turning private writing outward, and it is not the difficulty people expect. It is not deciding what to reveal. It is that a note to yourself is allowed to be a verdict, and a page for other people has to be an invitation. What a good entry actually does in a notebook is settle something. What it has to do in public is open it.
The Last Word to Entry 113
There is one entry in the notebook where Iqbal states his own method for judging time, and it sits fifty entries from the end of a book he was shortly going to abandon.
I judge the worth of my days, months and years from the experiences which they bring to me; and sometimes I am surprised to find that a single moment is more valuable than a whole year.
He was not, on that evidence, going to be troubled by a notebook that ran for four months rather than forty years.
If you have a notebook that stopped, this is the case to know about. A hundred and twenty-five entries, no plan, no continuity, no ending, and a man still taking pages out of it two decades later. The site has one other subject from outside Europe, a traveller’s records from a journey across Asia, and that one does not survive at all. This one survives, in a drawer, unfinished, and it worked.
The cheapest thing you can take from it is the entry about the comet. He looked at something at four in the morning, and did the arithmetic on when he would see it again, and wrote down what that did to him. It is one paragraph. Whether you write another hundred and twenty-four is a separate question, and on the evidence here, less important than it sounds. If you already keep a record of what you are reading, you are most of the way to what he was doing anyway.
If your own notebook stopped and you have been treating that as a failure, the useful correction is that a notebook is a resource before it is a habit, and an abandoned one is still a resource. I write about what is actually inside the famous notebooks, including the ones that quit. The email goes out from here.
