This paper was written for the Apprentices of 1978 and has been given to every Apprentice since. It is reprinted here as it first appeared.
You have been told to keep a Record, and you have been told that it matters more than anything else you will do this year. You do not believe it. No one does at first. You have come to learn an ancient art, and you have been handed a notebook, like a schoolchild. I should like to persuade you that the notebook is the art, or at least that there is no art without it.
Why we write
The difficulty with our subject is that it happens where no one else can see. If you tell me that the room grew warm at the third Gate, I cannot check it. Nor, a month later, can you. Memory is a helpful servant who tidies while we sleep. It rounds off what was awkward, supplies what was missing, and presents us in the morning with a neat account of an experience we did not quite have.
Against this there is one defense, which is ink. What you write within five minutes of closing the Gates is the nearest thing to a fact that our work affords. What you remember next week is a story. The Guild was founded by three people who discovered, on comparing notebooks, that they had attended three different rites in the same room on the same evening. Everything we have learned since has come from the notebooks, and nothing from the stories.
How to write
- Write at once. Before you take off the robe. Before tea. Certainly before you speak to anyone.
- Write in ink, in a bound book. Never tear out a page. If you must correct an entry, strike a single line through the words so that they can still be read, and date the correction.
- Write the circumstances. The date, the hour, the sky, your health and your temper. They will seem irrelevant. In two years you will find that they were not.
- Write what you did, exactly. Not "the usual practice," but what, and for how long.
- Write what you observed, and stop. "My hands grew warm." Not "I felt the element of Fire." The first is an observation. The second is an opinion, and you may be of a different opinion next year.
- Write the result later, with its own date. And if there was none, write that.
The three temptations
To improve
You will want the entry to read well. You will reach for "a profound stillness" where what occurred was that you were less fidgety than on Tuesday. Resist. Your Record is not literature, and no one will admire it. The plainest word is the truest, and if the plainest word is "nothing," then that is the entry.
To explain
You will want to say what it meant. The dream of the black dog was plainly Saturn; the warmth was plainly the South. Put your explanations, if you must have them, in a separate paragraph headed "Opinion," so that when you have outgrown them you can still find what happened underneath.
To omit
This is the worst, because it does not feel like dishonesty. You will leave out the day you did not practice, the rite you botched, the working that failed outright. But a Record with no failures in it is of no use to anyone, and least of all to you. The failed working is the most valuable entry you will ever make. A success tells you that something worked. A failure, honestly described, begins to tell you how.
What it is for
In the first year the Record keeps you honest. In the fifth it begins to teach you: you will read back and find patterns that you could not have seen from inside any single day. By the tenth it is the only teacher you wholly trust, because it is the only one who was there.
And there is a use beyond your own. Mr. Tolland has asked in his will that his notebooks be given to the Guild, and Miss Anselm and I intend the same. We have had the benefit of reading men and women who died centuries ago and who took the trouble to write down what they did. Most of them wrote it badly, with a great deal of improvement, explanation and omission, and we have spent seven years finding out which parts were true. It would be a courtesy to those who come after us to save them the trouble.
Write down what happened, not what you hoped. The Record is the only teacher who never flatters.