Steiner's Digest

Going through my notebook entries from the last few months. A heap of information, inspiration and introspection. Lots of story ideas. One is about a middle-aged divorced man who goes into the bathroom one morning and finds a sardine in his soap net. Another very random one: create a story that contains all the words of a solved crossword puzzle.

And yet another idea in which a frustrated daughter goes through the books of her recently deceased father’s extensive library, discovering that he used to record episodes of his life in the books he was reading at the time. So the daughter decides to go through all the books to bring her father’s account of his life into chronological order. But while she does that she keeps getting hooked on the journal entries and the books themselves. She tries to establish to what extent the books influenced that particular period of her father’s life. Of course she never achieves her initial goal of eventually having her father’s life laid out before her like one open book. Instead she rediscovers the joy of reading, something she hasn’t done for years, preoccupied with her children and the attempt to live up to some ideal of what a modern family should be like. I quite liked the idea when I had it. Perhaps I’ll write it one day. Perhaps not.

Then there are lists, most of them lists of things to do or not yet done. For example there is a list of all the books I started in 2025 and didn’t finish: Horse Under Water by Len Deighton, The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, Red Snow by Will Dean, Völkerschlachtdenkmal by Erich Loest, Lucy Worsley’s biography of Agatha Christie, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften by Robert Musil. As far as I remember, I enjoyed all of them – but apparently not enough to make it through to the end.

Or perhaps I like unfinished business. There’s a certain promise in it: one can still dream of what the end or result might be, like with a half-finished painting. It can’t disappoint, can’t provoke a clear but perhaps false reaction, can’t trigger an opinion that might become silly when you look back on it in retrospect. There are too many opinions in the world anyway and so little true knowledge and understanding. Most questions are far more inspiring than the answers. But then finding answers is as much in our nature as asking questions.

The notebooks keep growing anyway.