Isaac Newton kept two notebooks as a student, and neither of them is about physics. One is a pocket-book he bought blank for eightpence, whose first three pages are a coded list of every sin he could remember committing. The other is a list of things he did not know, written under headings he invented himself. Both survive. Both have been transcribed in full and put online for free. And between them they show a nineteen-year-old using a notebook for the two jobs it is still best at.
I went looking for Newton because of a single clause in something else I had written. The site’s post on Samuel Pepys mentions, almost in passing, that Pepys wrote in a shorthand system called tachygraphy and that Isaac Newton used the same one. I wanted to know what Newton had used it for. The answer turned out to be the more interesting half of the story.
The Pocket-Book That Cost Eightpence
Somewhere around 1662, Newton bought a small blank notebook. The flyleaf still carries the price he paid for it, written in his own hand: pret 8d. Eightpence.
The notebook is now held by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and the Newton Project at Oxford has catalogued and transcribed it. Most of it is what you would expect from a student: mathematical problems, geometry, diagrams, and later a long and rather touching list of expenses covering shoes, stockings, a hatband, a magnet, and money lost at cards.
The first three pages are different. They are in code, they are dated 1662, and they are a list of his sins.
They were unreadable for three hundred years. Shorthand is only a secret if nobody bothers to learn it, and eventually somebody did: the historian R. S. Westfall deciphered the passage and published what it said in Notes and Records of the Royal Society in 1963, in an article titled “Short-writing and the state of Newton’s Conscience, 1662”. This is one of the very few journals in the world that required a specialist to break before anyone could read it.
What Was on Those Pages
The first heading reads:
Before Whitsunday 1662.
Then the list begins. The spellings below are Newton’s own, preserved from the transcription.
Vsing the word (God) openly
Making a feather while on Thy day
Making a mousetrap on Thy day
Squirting water on Thy day
Swimming in a kimnel on Thy day
A kimnel is a tub. Roughly half the list is Sabbath-breaking of this kind, and read on its own it is almost comic: a boy indicting himself for making a mousetrap on a Sunday.
But it does not stay there.
Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
Punching my sister
Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar
Beating Arthur Storer
Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them
That last one is the line everybody quotes, and it is worth being careful with. Newton was writing down things he remembered doing as a boy, and he put this among them without comment or excuse, in the same voice and the same numbered sequence as the mousetrap. What he thought about it, he does not say. Neither will I. It is a sentence a child wrote about his mother and stepfather, recorded by the adult he became, and it does not need me to explain it.
What I did not expect was the way the list changes as it goes down the page. It starts as an inventory of a childhood, which is a finite thing you can complete. By the thirties it has become something else:
Setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee
Not living according to my belief
Fearing man above Thee
Caring for worldly things more than God
These are not incidents. They are conditions. He has run out of specific misdeeds and started writing down the shape of himself. And in the middle of the list, at items 21 and 22, two consecutive entries read, in full:
A relapse
A relapse
That is the moment the document stops being an inventory and becomes a log. He is no longer remembering. He is recording, as it happens, in the present tense, and the thing he is recording is that it happened again.
The first list runs to forty-nine numbered items. It is worth saying that you will see confident totals elsewhere – 47, 57, 58 – and the manuscript’s own numbering is irregular enough that I would not print one.
The Second List Is the Real Evidence
Later in the notebook there is a second heading:
Since Whitsunday 1662
Nine more items. And this is the part I find genuinely instructive, because it is the part that proves the first list was not a one-off unburdening.
Glutony
Glutony
Vsing Wilfords towel to spare my own
Negligence at the chapel.
Lying about a louse
He came back to the page. And what he brought back was smaller and more ordinary than what he had started with: gluttony twice, borrowing a friend’s towel rather than fetching his own, a lie about a louse.
That is what a maintained journal actually looks like, and it is the opposite of what people expect a journal to be. The first entry is dramatic because you have a lifetime saved up. The tenth entry is about a towel. Anyone who has kept a journal for more than a fortnight recognises the drop, and most people mistake it for failure. Newton’s second list suggests a better reading: the entries got smaller because he was writing more often.
Most of us have at least one thing we do not write down, and we usually have not decided that on purpose – we just reach the sentence and stop. That single unwritten sentence tends to be the one doing the most work. I send a short email about this kind of thing: journaling research, techniques from the archives, and what I have been trying myself. You can subscribe here.
Why It Was in Code
The system Newton used was devised by Thomas Shelton and known as tachygraphy, and it was widely taught in Cambridge in exactly these years. Pepys kept his diary in the same shorthand, for reasons his college is careful to spell out: speed came first, and privacy was the useful side effect, since his wife could not read a word of it.
Newton’s use of it runs the other way round. There is nothing in three pages of a sin list that needs to be written quickly. What it needed was to be unreadable.
I think that distinction matters more than it first appears. Pepys wrote fast and got privacy thrown in. Newton needed the privacy in order to write at all – the code was not protecting the page from other people so much as making it possible for him to put the sentence down in the first place. Some things only get written if the writing is hidden, and the hiding is not cowardice. It is the condition under which the honesty becomes available.
Whether Newton chose shorthand because he wanted to write this, or wrote this because he happened to have shorthand, is a question Westfall took up and I have not read closely enough to summarise. Either way, the two facts sit on the same three pages.
The Other Notebook
The second notebook is MS Add. 3996 at Cambridge University Library, which Newton used between roughly 1661 and 1665. It has been digitised page by page, so you can look at the actual handwriting.
Partway through it, on folio 88r, the undergraduate stops taking notes on his set reading and starts a new section. He writes a Latin motto at the top of the page:
Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas.
Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is a greater friend. The line was not his – it was a well-worn scholastic tag that a student of the period would have met in his reading, and he is copying it in rather than coining it. But he is copying it in here, at the head of the thing he is about to do, which is to set his teachers aside and work out what he thinks.
Underneath it he writes his title. He misspells it:
Questiones quædam Philosophiæ
Certain philosophical questions. The catalogue marks the slip with a sic. He did not proofread his own title page.
Then, across roughly fifty leaves, he writes out the headings. Not the answers. The headings.
Off the first mater
Of Attomes
Of a Vacuum & Attomes
Of Time & Eternity
Of Motion
Of Gravity & Levity
Of Colours
Of Memory
Of God
Of the Creation
Of the soule
Of Sleepe & Dreames
There are around thirty of these. Some he fills. Some he barely touches. All of them were written down before he had anything much to put underneath, and all of them were written before he was famous for anything at all – the bulk of this dates from 1664 and 1665, ahead of the year of work that made his reputation.
The Site Already Teaches This Technique
If those headings look familiar, it is because you have met them before under a different name.
The post on Feynman’s notebook of things he did not know opens on a Princeton graduate student writing NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT across the cover of a fresh notebook, and treating that cover as a working instruction rather than a confession. Newton did the same thing three hundred years earlier, at nineteen, in worse handwriting.
The mechanism is identical in both cases and it is not complicated. A heading is a container. An empty container is an invitation. You do not write “Of Sleepe & Dreames” because you have a theory of sleep and dreams; you write it because you do not, and now there is a place for one to go. The page starts collecting before you have decided to think about it.
That is a different act from most of what gets called journaling, which is the recording of things that already happened. This is the reverse: making a labelled space for something that has not happened yet.
Two Notebooks, One Instrument
It would be easy to file these separately – the sins list as a psychological curiosity, the Quaestiones as an intellectual document. I do not think they are two things.
One notebook holds what he could not answer. The other holds what he could not say. Both were written by the same person in the same few years, and neither was written for an audience: one was in code, and the other was a student’s private working notes. He was not yet anybody. There was no one to perform for.
That is the whole argument for keeping a journal, made accidentally, by someone who had no intention of making it. It is also the reason the notebooks other people kept are worth reading at all – not because the people became famous, but because the pages were written before they did. Newton’s are readable today only through a series of accidents of survival, which is the ordinary fate of these things: most of the notebooks that only just survived came far closer to being lost than anyone is comfortable with.
Two Things You Can Do Tonight
The first is Newton’s second notebook, and it takes a minute. Write a heading at the top of a blank page for something you do not know the answer to – about your work, a relationship, a decision you are avoiding – and then close the notebook and leave the page empty. Do not answer it. The point is the container. If you want a running start on the headings, the questions worth putting at the top of a page will give you more than you need.
The second is Newton’s first notebook, and it is harder. Notice whether there is a thing you are not writing down because someone might read it. Most people have one. Then make that an actual decision rather than a default – a locked file, a notebook nobody else opens, an entry you tear out afterwards, or the deliberate choice to leave it unwritten. Newton chose a cipher. The site has a longer look at who a journal is for if that question is a live one for you.
Either way, the useful discovery is that a nineteen-year-old who did not know he would be Isaac Newton needed both pages. The one where he asked what he could not answer, and the one where he wrote what he could not say.
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